Longitudinal Web Privacy Monitoring: Towards a Regulatory Tool

Abstract

Recent years have brought unprecedented amounts of regulation on third-party data collection. There have been more state-level privacy laws in the past three years than ever before, and private companies are separately choosing to regulate third-party data collection. Regulators will have a large role in determining what changes should occur and how effective these changes are. To empirically measure the impact of regulatory changes and to enforce their policies, regulators need longitudinal web privacy monitoring tools. Current tools are too complex and/or cannot collect data about privacy violations over time. To address this gap, I conducted user interviews to determine the features regulators need in their web privacy monitoring tools. I created Longitudinal, Automated Monitoring of Privacy (LAMP) in response to their needs, a proof-of-concept tool for longitudinal web privacy monitoring. I reveal the design and implementation details of LAMP, and then discuss why LAMP will continue to be useful even once the data collection world moves beyond current policies.