SaTC: CORE: Small: Improving Internet Privacy with Global Privacy Control

As the Internet is becoming an increasingly bigger part of many peoples' lives, privacy protection is becoming more important as well. To protect the privacy of users, lawmakers are introducing new privacy laws. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) gives California consumers a right to prohibit websites from selling their personal information to advertisers.

Similar rights are being introduced in other states and countries. However, it is time-consuming and effortful for users to exercise their rights. This project is developing software for making the process easier for users.

The research team is designing and testing settings inside browsers and other software that can be used to automatically send signals to websites informing them that they should not sell the users' personal information. To help adoption of such signals by browser makers, websites, and others, the research team is developing the Global Privacy Control (GPC) Internet standard at the Internet standards organization W3C.

The central idea of this project is that Internet users' privacy can be improved by standardizing and implementing Do Not Sell and other privacy rights in the form of usable browser and other software technologies. The research agenda covers five core research activities: (1) analyzing the compliance and usability of current privacy rights implementations on popular websites, (2) improving on existing implementations, (3) deploying the improved implementations in browsers and other software, (4) standardizing GPC at the W3C to achieve wide adoption, and (5) providing directions for future extension of GPC beyond the web, for example, in mobile technologies.

The research is guided by software engineering and privacy by design principles. Undergraduate students play a crucial role in the project. It aims to train tomorrow's socially-cognizant tech leaders, increase the participation of underrepresented students in computer science, and evolve the computer science curriculum in the liberal arts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.