What is PrivacyScore?

PrivacyScore is an automated website scanner that allows you to investigate Websites for privacy and security issues. You can scan individual websites, or enter a list of related websites to see how they compare against each other.

What PrivacyScore is not

The tests carried out by PrivacyScore have been tested extensively. However we consider most them to be unreliable at the moment.

At the moment, PrivacyScore can only report on technical security and privacy measures that can be analyzed automatically. In particular, we do not analyze privacy policies, whether informed consent was obtained, etc. This may change in the future.

Our Current Checks

Our beta release of PrivacyScore reports on four types of issues. Your feedback is very much appreciated!

• Tracking and Privacy Checks test if the website is tracking you, or allowing others to do so.
• Website Encryption tests check if the webserver offers HTTPS connections, and how securely they are configured.
• Web Security Checks test if the website has any obvious security flaws.
• Mail Encryption is often overlooked. PrivacyScore checks whether the mail servers of a website support state-of-the-art transport encryption.

The PrivacyScore Vision

We want to offer users, activists, data protection authorities, and data protection officers an easily accessible and flexible tool to assess the security and privacy measures of websites. PrivacyScore allows its users to

• determine whether best practices in security and privacy protection techniques are implemented
• assess how a website ranks within its peer group
• aggregate results according to site attributes (such as: country or funding source)
• influence the ranking according to their own preferences

Talks and Publications

• PrivacyScore: Test websites and rank them according to their security and privacy features. PrivacyWeek.at, Vienna, 27 Oct 2017 (by D. Herrmann).
• PrivacyScore: Ein Benchmarking-Portal zur Analyse von Webseiten auf Sicherheits- und Privatheitsprobleme. German OWASP Day, Essen, 14 Nov 2017 (by P. Wichmann and D. Herrmann).
• PrivacyScore: Improving Privacy and Security via Crowd-Sourced Benchmarks of Websites (2017). In: Schweighofer E., Leitold H., Mitrakas A., Rannenberg K. (eds) Privacy Technologies and Policy. APF 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10518. Springer, Cham, pp. 178–191 (authored by by Maass M., Wichmann P., Pridöhl H., Herrmann D.).
• PrivacyScore: Analyse von Webseiten auf Sicherheits- und Privatheitsprobleme (2017). In: Eibl, M. & Gaedke, M. (Hrsg.), INFORMATIK 2017. Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn. S. 1049–1060 (authored by Maass, M., Laubach, A., Herrmann, D.).