PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites
This tool addresses privacy and security risks for website users and can be used by data protection authorities for compliance checks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarking projects.
The authors tackled the problem of website privacy and security risks by introducing PrivacyScore, an automated scanning portal that benchmarks multiple websites, covering a wider range of issues than existing projects and allowing user control over ranking methodology.
Website owners make conscious and unconscious decisions that affect their users, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks in the process. In this paper we introduce PrivacyScore, an automated website scanning portal that allows anyone to benchmark security and privacy features of multiple websites. In contrast to existing projects, the checks implemented in PrivacyScore cover a wider range of potential privacy and security issues. Furthermore, users can control the ranking and analysis methodology. Therefore, PrivacyScore can also be used by data protection authorities to perform regularly scheduled compliance checks. In the long term we hope that the transparency resulting from the published benchmarks creates an incentive for website owners to improve their sites. The public availability of a first version of PrivacyScore was announced at the ENISA Annual Privacy Forum in June 2017.