  When surfing the Internet, individuals leak personal and corporate
information to third parties whose (legitimate or not) businesses revolve
around the value of collected data. The implications are serious, from a person
unwillingly exposing private information to an unknown third party, to a
company unable to manage the flow of its information to the outside world. The
point is that individuals and companies are more and more kept out of the loop
when it comes to control private data. With the goal of empowering informed
choices in information leakage through the Internet, we propose CROWDSURF, a
system for comprehensive and collaborative auditing of data that flows to
Internet services. Similarly to open-source efforts, we enable users to
contribute in building awareness and control over privacy and communication
vulnerabilities. CROWDSURF provides the core infrastructure and algorithms to
let individuals and enterprises regain control on the information exposed on
the web. We advocate CROWDSURF as a data processing layer positioned right
below HTTP in the host protocol stack. This enables the inspection of
clear-text data even when HTTPS is deployed and the application of processing
rules that are customizable to fit any need. Preliminary results obtained
executing a prototype implementation on ISP traffic traces demonstrate the
feasibility of CROWDSURF.
