Are they Toeing the Line? Diagnosing Privacy Compliance Violations among Browser Extensions
Yuxi Ling, Kailong Wang, Guangdong Bai, Haoyu Wang, Jin Song Dong
Abstract
Browser extensions have emerged as integrated characteristics in modern browsers, with the aim to boost the online browsing experience. Their advantageous position between a user and the Internet endows them with easy access to the user’s sensitive data, which has raised mounting privacy concerns from both legislators and extension users. In this work, we propose an end-to-end approach to automatically diagnosing the privacy compliance violations among extensions. It analyzes the compliance of privacy policy versus regulation requirements and their actual privacy-related practices during runtime. This approach can serve the extension users, developers and store operators as an efficient and practical detection mechanism for privacy compliance violations.