Privacy Enhancing Tools: A Literature Review on End-User Role and Evaluation

Trends show that privacy concerns are rising, but end users are not armed with enoughmechanisms to protect themselves. Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) or morespecifically, tools (PET-tools) are one of the mechanisms that could help users in this sense.These tools, however, reportedly have low adoption rates, and users tend to be reluctant tointegrate them into their daily use of the Internet. Detailed scrutiny of current research onPET-tools, however, can guide future research to help overcome low adoption of these tools.We conducted a literature review on PET-tools to enumerate the types of tools available andhow they are being evaluated, in order to shed more light on the missing elements in theirevaluations. We reviewed and coded 72 articles in the PET-tool literature. Our resultshighlight two important issues: 1. Evaluation of most tools is performed using only artificial,summative and ex-post strategies; 2. While usability evaluation is quite common, evaluationof enhanced privacy is lacking. This research hopes to contribute to better PET-tooldevelopment, and encourage the inclusion of users in the evaluation and design process.USEMPPrivacyFla