CHRAVAT - Chronology Awareness Visual Analytic Tool

Nowadays, the amount of information spread over networks is extremely large, and many sensible data are granted by legitimate owners aiming to exploit different networking services. In particular, the majority of people give their own consent for processing personal data without understanding how network providers will manage them, and if they will be shared among different network providers. In this paper, we propose a tool exploiting visualization techniques in order to make a user aware of how his/her personal data are exchanged and shared during daily web browsing activities. In particular, the proposed tool enables a user to interactively visualize the communication flows during the aforesaid browsing process, and to discover possibly hidden network providers involved in it. Moreover, the graphical interface also provides real-time summary graphs, which show the amount of information acquired from the network. Finally, we performed several users studies aiming to analyse how the tool can improve the user's perception on the privacy issues that s/he is exposed to. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tool.