Efficacy of Browser UI Indications for Related Website Sets Exceptions

Determine the efficacy of explicitly indicating to users in the browser user interface when the browser grants exceptions to the site-as-privacy-boundary based on Related Website Sets.

Background

The Related Website Sets mechanism reduces privacy protections between sites deemed related, but the user paper in this paper shows that users often fail to recognize such relationships, risking privacy-harming outcomes.

To address this mismatch, the authors suggest explicitly indicating exceptions to the site-as-privacy-boundary in the browser UI and leave evaluating the effectiveness of this approach for future work.

References

This suggests that exceptions made to the site-as-privacy-boundary, on the basis of relatedness, need to be explicitly indicated to the user (e.g., via the browser UI itself); we leave study of the efficacy of such an approach to future work.

— A First Look at Related Website Sets (2408.07495 - McQuistin et al., 14 Aug 2024) in Section 6, Conclusions