2020 Vision for Web Privacy

Privacy is getting eroded as more surveillance is happening. The history of web privacy will be discussed along with a vision for the future. This talk will discuss how web users are tracked, what can be done about it, the impact of web surveillance on society, and privacy regulations. Web privacy has evolved significantly in the past two decades. There was no application-level encryption and snooping on what users were doing was trivial. As encryption, proxies, and other anonymity schemes start getting used, web surveillance has switched to using metadata [1]. At the moment, achieving web privacy is similar to the arms race of virus/anti-virus. New methods to break web users' privacy are found as current vectors are patched or mitigated. Web surveillance or invading web users' privacy can have both useful and harmful consequences. The methods can be used to identify illegal activity and ensure that users are who they say they are. However, these methods can also be used to perform censorship and track what users are doing on the web without their knowledge. The latter could be used for targeted advertising - on one hand, this means more useful advertisements, but on the other, it could mean targeted pricing. Many people might say they have nothing to hide; this talk will show how this is such a misleading myth. The evolution and future of webbrowser fingerprinting [2] and website fingerprinting [3] will be discussed, along with other societal and human impacts of web privacy on the future.