From User Insights to Actionable Metrics: A User-Focused Evaluation of Privacy-Preserving Browser Extensions

The rapid growth of web tracking via advertisements has led to an increased adoption of privacy-preserving browser extensions. These extensions are crucial for blocking trackers and enhancing the overall web browsing experience. The advertising industry is constantly changing, leading to ongoing development and improvements in both new and existing ad-blocking and anti-tracking extensions. Despite this, there is a lack of comprehensive studies exploring the set of user concerns associated with these extensions. Our research addresses this gap by identifying five user concerns and establishing a privacy and usability topics framework, specific to privacy-preserving extensions. Also, many of these user concerns have not been extensively studied in the prior works. Therefore, we conducted an extensive literature review to identify shortcomings in the current benchmarking methodology. This led to the development of new techniques, including experiments to measure newly identified metrics. Our study reveals eight new metrics for privacy-preserving extensions that have not been previously measured. Additionally, our study enhances the measurement methodology for two metrics, ensuring precise results. We focus particularly on metrics that users commonly encounter on the web and report in Chrome web store reviews. Our goal is to serve as a foundational reference for future research in this field.

通过广告的网络跟踪快速增长，导致越来越多的保护隐私浏览器扩展。这些扩展对于阻止跟踪器和增强整体网络浏览体验至关重要。广告行业正在不断变化，从而导致新的和现有的广告范围和反向跟踪扩展的持续发展和改进。尽管如此，缺乏全面的研究来探讨与这些扩展相关的用户关注点。我们的研究通过确定五个用户关注并建立隐私和可用性主题框架来解决这一差距，该框架特定于隐私保护扩展。同样，在先前的工作中，许多这些用户关注点尚未得到广泛的研究。因此，我们进行了广泛的文献综述，以确定当前基准测试方法中的缺点。这导致了新技术的发展，包括测量新确定的指标的实验。我们的研究揭示了以前尚未测量的八个新的保存扩展指标。此外，我们的研究增强了两个指标的测量方法，从而确保了精确的结果。我们特别关注用户在网络上经常遇到的指标，并在Chrome网络商店评论中报告。我们的目标是作为该领域未来研究的基础参考。