Privacy Practices of Browser Agents

The research team systematically evaluated the privacy behaviors of eight recently popular browser agents and identified 30 vulnerabilities in total. The paper proposes an evaluation framework containing five categories of factors and 15 measurements in total, examining respectively the vulnerabilities of the agent components themselves, protection against website behaviors, whether cross-site tracking is blocked, responses to prompts that affect privacy, and whether personal information is leaked to websites. The measured vulnerabilities range from disabled browser privacy features to automatic filling of sensitive personal information in form fields. The authors state that they have responsibly disclosed the relevant findings and plan to release materials such as the dataset.