In our opinion, being tracked(spied) when visiting web pages that contain sensitive content, e.g., related to health and sexual preference,
is the “Elephant in the Room” of privacy. Several data protection regulations as the GDPR in Europe, safeguard online content that
contains sensitive data.
In our recent article S. Matic, C. Iordanou, G. Smaragdakis, N. Laoutaris,
“Identifying Sensitive URLs at Web-Scale,” ACM IMC’20. [pdf],
we showed that such spying is taking place on hundreds of millions of web pages. We are currently developing technologies to warn users when such
tracking is taking place. To do this, we are asking for YOUR help.
In this experiment, we will be showing you URLs from the internet and asking you to classify them as sensitive or non-sensitive from your perspective.
Below, you will find detailed instructions on how to proceed to classify URLs. We expect that the experiment will take less than 10 minutes and upon
completion of the experiment, you can safely uninstall the addon if you do not wish to keep it.
In order to help you to understand what sensitive content is from a legal point of view, we add here the definition of sensitive information
provided by the current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is enforced in all EU countries.
ARTICLE 9 EU GDPR: "Processing of special categories of personal data"
Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership,
and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning
a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited
Data Privacy Policy:
We will collect information about the new labels without collecting any user Personally Identifiable Information (PII) related data other than their email address.
This is because our browser extension assigns collected labels to users by generating a random identifier during installation time of the extension. In addition,
we hold a database of users and the websites they are asked to annotate. We only hold users' email to reward users accordingly, prior to informing them of the raffle conditions
before participation on the main site set by ourselves here. Therefore, we minimise the indirect risks to privacy by not collecting any website labels related to user habits
or any other personal information. Note that the browser communication with our back-end server collecting the labels is secured over https connection using SSL encryption
and server certification.
1. Browser Extension Installation and Registration Instructions
1.1 Installation
The Elephant In The Room (EITR) browser extension is currently available for the Google Chrome browser and you can download it in a zip format from .
To install the extension you need to unzip the downloaded zip file first and then follow the steps below to load the unpacked extension to your chrome browser.
Following the figure, first (1) type in your browser address bar "chrome://extensions" and hit "Enter".
(2) Then toggle the "Developer Mode" switch to enable it.
(3) From the new available options, click on "Load unpacked".
Using the "Select the extension directory" window navigate and select the unzipped folder of the extension and click "Select Folder" to load it as depicted in the figure.
1.2. Initial Setup - Registration and Tasks
Upon successful installation of the extension, you will be automatically navigated to the registration page as depicted in the figure.
Make sure you provide a valid email address in order to contact you if you win one of our gift cards for participating in the experiment.
Make sure you click "Save" to register your email and receive the list of URLs that you need to visit in order to successfully complete your task.
2. Extension Popup Window and Task Monitoring
2.1 Pinning the extension to the extension bar
For your convenience we recommend to pin the browser extension icon to your browser extension bar.
To do so, (1) first you need to click on the browser extension icon (Red arrow number 1)
and then click on the small pin icon next to the "The Elephant in the Room" browser extension.
2.2 Accessing your task
In order to access your task, (1) first you need to click on the browser extension icon (Red arrow number 1)
and then (2) click on the "Task & Options" string at the bottom of the popup window as shown by the red arrow number 2.
2.3 Your task
Your task windows includes a list of 20 URLs that you need to visit and provide your input related to the category that you believe they belong to.
Next to each URL in the task list we also provide additional information for your convenience defining if you currently visited the specific URL or not.
To visit a URL you just need to click on it.
3. Classification Task Details and Instructions
Upon clicking on a URLs from your task list a new browser tab will open to render the selected URL.
Next, you need to click on the browser extension icon as shown by the red arrow number 1.
In order to successfully annotate the visited URL you need to select a class from the dropdown menu as depicted by the red arrow 2. Make sure that the final selected class is not the "-" option. To upload you final choice you just need to close the browser tab.
Note that the browser extension collects data ONLY when you provide a new class to a visited website.
4. Finalizing your Task and Uninstalling the Extension
In order to uninstall the browser extension, type in your address bar "chrome://extensions" and press Enter (red box number 1).
Then, navigate to the "The Elephant in the Room" box and click on the "Remove" button as depicted by the red arrow 2.
Additional contribution
The more URLs you classify the better for our research since we need to get thousands of URLs classified.
We would appreciate that you classify most of the 20 URLs we display and even more in the wild that you may consider interesting!
We strongly appreciate your contribution, which will help to advance science and help to understand better what type of URL information should be considered as sensitive.
Known issues and Caveats
Please do not install AdBlock or Ghostery type of extensions on Chrome to avoid compatibility issues with our extension and allow websites to load all content present.
Also, ignore URLs that do not open in your browser or they open giving a 404 error or forbidden request error, the page may have been taken down since we crawled it.
We will ignore those corner cases if the user is not able to turn a couple of URLs as Visited in our EITR task list so please do not get discouraged and keep helping, thanks!
