Protecting User Privacy in Online Settings via Supervised Learning

Companies that have an online presence—in particular, companies that are exclusively digital—often subscribe to this business model: collect data from the user base, then expose the data to advertisement agencies in order to turn a profit. Such companies routinely market a service as “free” while obfuscating the fact that they tend to “charge” users in the currency of personal information rather than money. However, online companies also gather user data for more principled purposes, such as improving the user experience and aggregating statistics. The problem is the sale of user data to third parties. In this work, we design an intelligent approach to online privacy protection that leverages supervised learning. By detecting and blocking data collection that might infringe on a user’s privacy, we can then restore a degree of digital privacy to the user. In our evaluation, we collect a dataset of network requests and measure the performance of several classifiers that adhere to the supervised learning paradigm. The results of our evaluation demonstrate the feasibility and potential of our approach.