Chapter Twenty Three. Privacy Analysis for the Casual User with Bugnosis

David Martin

BUGNOSIS ^[1] is a privacy analysis tool for the typical end user. Like Privacy Bird (described in the previous chapter), Bugnosis is a benevolent snoop: it taps into your web browser so that it can deduce the privacy characteristics of the web sites you visit. It uses some of the same Internet Explorer facilities as Privacy Bird, and presents results with a similar balance of approachability and charm as opposed to technical detail. But these two IE add-ons are concerned with different parts of the web privacy question. Privacy Bird uses the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) to decide whether a web site's privacy policy is consistent with the user's desires, and Bugnosis identifies a particular type of web site privacy practiceone that says a lot about the nature of the Webnamely, the use of web bugs to gather information about web users.^[2]

^[1] Bugnosis is available from http://www.bugnosis.org/.

^[2] We're talking about bugs as in "This room is bugged, so be careful what you say."