ShareMeNot: Balancing Privacy and Functionality of Third-Party Social Widgets

Web tracking, the practice by which Web sites identify and collect information about users, generally in the form of some subset of Web browsing history, has become a topic of increased public debate. In this article, we summarize what we have learned about the Web tracking ecosystem and describe a taxonomy for understanding Web tracking behavior. In particular, we found that no existing browser mechanisms prevent tracking by social media sites via widgets (such as the Facebook “Like” button) while still allowing those widgets to achieve their utility goals. We then describe ShareMeNot, a browser extension that we developed to balance privacy with the intended functionality of social widgets.