Privacy indicator: Tool to understand data vulnerability

Abstract

With the rise of firms that depend primarily on data for their operations, information has become an increasingly important asset, and with the rise in importance of data for these firms, the vulnerability of individual information has also increased multifold. We have already seen cases of cyber-attacks, disenfranchisement of voters, the Cambridge Analytica case, applications unreasonably tracking user activities, etc. In such a scenario, the user is practically unaware of how sensitive is the information which they are sharing with an application or a website and how that information can be used or misused. It then becomes imperative to create a standardized metric that can be used to gauge the level of vulnerability the user can expect or a scale that measures the sensitivity of the private information which the user has permitted a particular website or application to use.