# Effective Techniques for Protecting the Privacy of Web Users
###### Abstract  
With the rapid growth of web networks, the security and privacy of online users are becoming more compromised. Especially, the use of third-party services to track users' activities and improve website performance. Therefore, it is unavoidable that using personal information to create unique profiles may violate individuals' privacy. Recently, several tools have been developed such as anonymity, anti-tracking, and browser plugins to ensure the protection of users from third-party tracking methods by blocking JavaScript programs and other website components. However, the current state lacks an efficient approach that provides a comprehensive solution. In this paper, we conducted a systematic analysis of the most common privacy protection tools based on their accuracy and performance by evaluating their effectiveness in correctly classifying tracking and functional JavaScript programs, then evaluating the estimated time the browser takes to render the pages for each tool. To achieve this, we automatically browsed the most 50 websites determined in 2022 and categorized them according to different fields to get the in-page (as part of HTML script tags), and all external JavaScript programs. Then we collected data and datasets of 1578 JavaScript elements and obtained six diverse Firefox profiles when the tools were enabled. The results found that Ghostery has the highest percentage of allowing most functioning scripts with the lowest average error rate (AER). While at the same time NoScript achieved the highest percentage of blocking most tracking scripts since it is the highest blocker of third-party services. After that, we examined the speed of the browser finding that, Ghostery improved the load time by 36.2% faster than the baseline, while Privacy Badger only reduced the load time by 7.1%. We believe that our findings can help users decide on a privacy tool that meets their needs. Moreover, researchers and developers can use our findings to improve the privacy of internet users by designing more effective privacy protection techniques. privacy; JavaScript programs; third-party services; security; web tracking Article  
Effective Techniques for Protecting the Privacy of Web Users  
[PERSON], [PERSON], M.  
1  
[PERSON], [PERSON], M.  
Figure 1 demonstrates a general web tracking scenario implemented by JavaScript programs and shows how visitors' data could be silently sent by HTTP headers. When a user searches a URL of example.com and upon retrieving the webpage from a first-party domain, the visitor's browser processes all the HTML tags and every JavaScript program is executed within these tags (steps 1 and 2). When the browser executes JavaScript programs, they enable the browser to send other requests to a variety of websites operated by third-party domains looking for additional content (step 3). The retrieved JavaScript programs can be useful based on the functionalities they provide, such as fetching content from a CDN or it can be tracking such as analytics, ads, etc. Afterward, when the website is completely loaded (step 4), the JavaScript programs can keep track of the visitor's behavior on the website, access the cookies database, or even reconstruct the visitor ID (steps 5 and 6). Finally, JavaScript programs can communicate back to the third-party websites and pass the tracking data to the third-party servers (step 7). In consequence, JavaScript programs are typically used for various purposes, including data analytics, tracking services, social media platforms, and content distribution networks (CDNs). The content distribution network, also known as a content delivery network, is a network of servers and data centers that are geographically distributed and designed to enhance the performance and availability of online data transmission by the use of caching and other techniques [2].