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CrowdSurf: Empowering Transparency in the Web

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Mario BaldiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 45, Issue 5

Pages 5 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2831347.2831349

Published: 30 September 2015 Publication History

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Abstract

Individuals lack proper means to supervise the services they contact and the information they exchange when surfing the web. This security task has become challenging due to the complexity of the modern web, of the data delivering technology, and even to the adoption of encryption, which, while improving privacy, makes in-network services ineffective. The implications are serious, from a person contacting undesired services or unwillingly exposing private information, to a company being unable to control the flow of its information to the outside world. To empower transparency and the capability of taking informed choices in the web, we propose CROWDSURF, a system for comprehensive and collaborative auditing of data exchanged with Internet services. Similarly to crowdsourced efforts, we enable users to contribute in building awareness, supported by the semi-automatic analysis of data offered by a cloud-based system. The result is the creation of "suggestions" that individuals can transform in enforceable "rules" to customize their web browsing policy. CROWDSURF provides the core infrastructure to let individuals and enterprises regain visibility and control on their web activity. Preliminary results obtained executing a prototype implementation demonstrate the feasibility and potential of CROWDSURF.

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Cited By

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Metwalley HTraverso SMellia M(2016)Using Passive Measurements to Demystify Online TrackersComputer10.1109/MC.2016.7449:3(50-55)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MC.2016.74
Liu YSong HBermudez IMislove ABaldi MTongaonkar ASharma AAgrawal RGrossglauser M(2015)Identifying Personal Information in Internet TrafficProceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks10.1145/2817946.2817947(59-70)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2817946.2817947

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CrowdSurf: Empowering Transparency in the Web

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 45, Issue 5

October 2015

41 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/2831347

Editors:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain
,
Katerina Argyraki
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Hitesh Ballani
Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
,
Fabián Bustamante
Northwestern University, USA
,
Joseph Camp
SMU, USA
,
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University, USA
,
Phillipa Gill
Stony Brook University, USA
,
Marco Mellia
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
,
Bhaskaran Raman
IIT Bombay, India
,
Joel Sommers
Colgate University, USA
,
Aline Carneiro Viana
INRIA, France

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 September 2015

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 45, Issue 5

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Cited By

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Metwalley HTraverso SMellia M(2016)Using Passive Measurements to Demystify Online TrackersComputer10.1109/MC.2016.7449:3(50-55)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MC.2016.74
Liu YSong HBermudez IMislove ABaldi MTongaonkar ASharma AAgrawal RGrossglauser M(2015)Identifying Personal Information in Internet TrafficProceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks10.1145/2817946.2817947(59-70)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2817946.2817947

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