Abstract

World Wide Web and the graphic user agents(web browsers) have brought the internet to billions of new users who use it hours on end daily to perform a multitude of tasks. However, the user agents also provide a means to compromise the users privacy by employing various tracking mechanisms and use of analytics. The browser was intended to make the use of the internet easy with a simple and intuitive inter-face. It has morphed into a beast which has hidden in it mechanisms to allow suppliers of information content, on-line shopping companies and multitude of third parties to target publicity based on information
gleaned from previous web journeys of users of these browsers. This paper focuses on summarizing privacy problems on the client side and highlights the default settings of some of the popular browsers and points out the difficulty of creating the proper settings even to disable cookies from third parties. We present some independent add-ons to help in preserving some privacy and some of the drawbacks of such band-aid solutions. Finally, we present some suggestions so that the user can know exactly what is being recorded in the cookies based on double encryption giving back some control to the user of his own
data.