The Effectiveness of Privacy Enhancing Technologies against Fingerprinting

Abstract: We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on new PETs that currently lack a user base. Observational methods enable scale and drawing from the browsers currently in real-world use. By applying experimentally created models of a PET's behavior to an observational data set, our novel hybrid method offers the best of both worlds. We find the Tor Browser Bundle to be the most effective PET amongst the set we tested. We find that some PETs have inconsistent behaviors, which can do more harm than good.