Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Brandon J Maslen

Denis X Charles

Sergey M Yekhanin

Sivakanth Gopi

Erik Daniel Anderson

Edward Arthur Scott Low

Joseph J Pfeiffer, Jr

Davis Leland Gilton

Edward Arther Scott Low

Aleksandr Rebrikov

John Robert Mooring

Disclosed is a system that tracks website usage without compromising user privacy. The system aggregates website usage data of multiple users across multiple websites. Website usage data is aggregated in a way that preserves each individual user's privacy. Specifically, information relevant to a particular user may be obtained from the aggregated information without exposing what was actually collected from that user. In some configurations, user-specific website usage data is aggregated using trusted execution environment computing hardware. This ensures that privacy is preserved while user-specific data is transferred to and processed by the system. The trusted execution environment applies differential privacy techniques to ensure that use of the aggregated information does not reveal actual information about a user's website usage history. In this way, privacy is maintained while still enabling many of the scenarios that would otherwise rely on third-party cookies.

Privacy preserving user personalization using noisy ranking

Embodiments described herein are directed to intelligently classifying Web trackers in a privacy preserving manner and mitigating the effects of such Web trackers. As users browse the Web and encounter various Web sites, tracker-related metrics are determined. The metrics are obfuscated to protect the privacy of the user. The obfuscated metrics are provided as inputs to a machine learning model, which is configured to output a classification for the Web trackers associated with the Web sites visited by the user. Depending on the classification, the effects of the Web trackers are mitigated by placing restrictions on the Web trackers. The restrictions for a particular Web tracker may be relaxed based on a level of user engagement a user has with respect to the tracker's associated Web site. By doing so, the compatibility risks associated with tracking prevention are mitigated for Web sites that are relatively important to the user.

Systems and methods for web tracker classification and mitigation

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Brandon J Maslen