Extension Description Chris

Summary:

This extension shows the privacy grade (from A to F) for most sites that you visit, based on what they do with their users' data. These grades are based on how well or how poorly that sites utilize their users' data.

We give stellar grades to 1st-party sites that:

-do not allow a large amount of 3rd party networks to be called on their site (and do not let a lot of 3rd party networks to download tracking cookies on the visitor's browser)

-honor both “opt-out” cookies and “do not track” requests

We give poor grades to 1st-party sites that:

-call a lot of 3rd party networks and then those 3rd party networks download multiple tracking cookies on the user's browser

-call 3rd-party networks which have poor quality scores themselves (because the 3rd parties do not allow for cookie opt out or do not honor DNT requests)

-continue to track users online behavior even after the users opt-out of online tracking through the use of “opt-out” cookies

-continue to track users online behavior if the user turns on the “do not track” option in their browsers

Methodology of generating the grades:

We crawled the top 500 Alexa sites on 4/14/12 and we logged all cookie downloads that resulted from those crawls. We performed three different crawls:

-first, with a clean-sate browser without any opt-out cookies or do not track requests

-second, with the BeefTaco extension active (which downloads most opt-out cookies)

-third, with the "do not track" request option selected in the browser

We performed these different crawls to analyze if the sites honored opt out cookies and/or “do not track” requests from the headers. Based on these crawls, we graded the top 500 Alexa sites and relevant 3rd-party networks. Data from the crawls are located at trackingcookie.info for reference.