Extensive usage of web applications and online services like ecommerce, finance, insurance, social media etc. has become part of our day-to-day life. By virtue of which, lot of personal, sensitive and confidential data is being uploaded to public domains. Privacy of the users is more compromised due to the tracking of web activity by the browsers and the application vendors. User’s online activity is being tracked by both the browsers and application vendors using cookies, tracking scripts and third party sharing. Hence the privacy of the user is at stake while using web applications. The major privacy threats include auto profiling, disclosure, discrimination, surveillance etc. In the recent past, there is an increase in user awareness with respect to privacy. Few privacy protection tools were developed in the recent past. In this paper we proposed a novel method for web data protection called privacy guard with improved privacy and compared the same with existing privacy protection tools. We have experimented with 50 plus websites in three different browsers viz. chrome, firefox and edge. Our privacy guard exhibited better performance by blocking all types of cookies, preventing functional java script from execution and detecting third party data sharing programs with reasonable load time to render the page. Our privacy guard can also be used as a browser extension. This paper gives a detailed description of how privacy guard was developed, the privacy threats addressed by privacy guard and its comparison with existing privacy protection tools like privacy badger, NoScript, Ad block plus and Ghostery.

Web Privacy, Third party sharing, Tracking scripts, Web application, Privacy guard