Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance mechanism to gather extensive user information. This paper introduces PriveShield, a light-weight privacy mechanism that disrupts the information gathering cycle while offering more control to Internet users to maintain their privacy. PriveShield is implemented as a browser extension that offers an adjustable privacy feature to surf the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously without any changes to underlying browser code or services. When necessary, multiple factors are automatically analyzed on the client side to isolate cookies and other information that are the basis of online tracking. PriveShield creates isolated profiles for clients based on their browsing history, interactions with websites, and the amount of time they spend on specific websites. This allows the users to easily prevent unwanted browsing information from being shared with third parties and ad exchanges without the need for manual configuration. Our evaluation results from 54 real-world scenarios show that our extension is effective in preventing retargeted ads in 91% of those scenarios.

翻译：网络追踪是万维网上一种普遍存在的做法，其伦理、安全性和隐私性均存在争议。尽管网络追踪能为互联网用户提供个性化的精选内容，但它同时也作为一种复杂的监控机制，用于收集广泛的用户信息。本文介绍PriveShield，一种轻量级隐私保护机制，该机制通过打破信息收集循环，同时赋予互联网用户更多控制权以维护其隐私。PriveShield以浏览器扩展形式实现，提供可调节的隐私功能，使用户能够同时以多重身份或账户浏览网页，且无需修改底层浏览器代码或服务。在必要时，系统会在客户端自动分析多种因素，以隔离作为网络追踪基础的Cookie及其他信息。PriveShield根据用户的浏览历史、与网站的交互行为以及在特定网站停留时长，为其创建隔离配置文件。这使得用户无需手动配置即可轻松阻止非必要的浏览信息被共享给第三方和广告交易平台。我们在54个真实场景中的评估结果表明，该扩展在91%的场景中能有效防止重定向广告。