大帮手还是老大哥？审计生成式 AI 助手中的追踪、画像与个性化
Big Help or Big Brother? Auditing Tracking, Profiling, and Personalization in Generative AI Assistants
AI总结：
本文审计十款主流 GenAI 浏览器扩展，结合流量分析与提示框架，揭示其自动收集并共享网页、表单及敏感信息、跨场景画像并个性化响应的隐私风险。
摘要：
生成式 AI（GenAI）浏览器助手将 GenAI 的强大能力集成到网页浏览器中，以提供问答、内容摘要和智能体导航等丰富体验。这些助手如今以浏览器扩展的形式提供，不仅能够追踪搜索和点击数据等详细浏览活动，还可以自主执行填写表单等任务，从而引发严重的隐私担忧。理解 GenAI 浏览器扩展的设计与运行方式（包括它们如何收集、存储、处理和共享用户数据）至关重要。为此，我们研究了它们根据用户的显式或推断人口统计属性及兴趣对用户进行画像并个性化其响应的能力。我们执行网络流量分析，并使用一种新颖的提示框架，审计十个最流行的 GenAI 浏览器助手扩展的追踪、画像和个性化行为。我们发现，这些助手并非依赖浏览器内的本地模型，而在很大程度上依赖服务端 API，这些 API 可在没有明确用户交互的情况下被自动调用。被调用时，它们会收集网页内容并与其第一方服务器共享，这些内容通常是完整 HTML DOM，有时甚至包括用户的表单输入。一些助手还会向 Google Analytics 等第三方追踪器共享标识符和用户提示。即使网页包含健康信息等敏感信息，或网页表单中输入了姓名、SSN 等个人信息，这种收集和共享仍会继续。我们发现，若干 GenAI 浏览器助手会推断年龄、性别、收入和兴趣等人口统计属性，并使用这种可跨浏览上下文延续的画像来个性化响应。总之，我们的工作表明，GenAI 浏览器助手能够而且确实在收集个人和敏感信息以进行画像与个性化，且几乎没有甚至完全没有保障措施。
英文摘要：
Generative AI (GenAI) browser assistants integrate powerful capabilities of GenAI in web browsers to provide rich experiences such as question answering, content summarization, and agentic navigation. These assistants, available today as browser extensions, can not only track detailed browsing activity such as search and click data, but can also autonomously perform tasks such as filling forms, raising significant privacy concerns. It is crucial to understand the design and operation of GenAI browser extensions, including how they collect, store, process, and share user data. To this end, we study their ability to profile users and personalize their responses based on explicit or inferred demographic attributes and interests of users. We perform network traffic analysis and use a novel prompting framework to audit tracking, profiling, and personalization by the ten most popular GenAI browser assistant extensions. We find that instead of relying on local in-browser models, these assistants largely depend on server-side APIs, which can be auto-invoked without explicit user interaction. When invoked, they collect and share webpage content, often the full HTML DOM and sometimes even the user's form inputs, with their first-party servers. Some assistants also share identifiers and user prompts with third-party trackers such as Google Analytics. The collection and sharing continues even if a webpage contains sensitive information such as health or personal information such as name or SSN entered in a web form. We find that several GenAI browser assistants infer demographic attributes such as age, gender, income, and interests and use this profile--which carries across browsing contexts--to personalize responses. In summary, our work shows that GenAI browser assistants can and do collect personal and sensitive information for profiling and personalization with little to no safeguards.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
