Status/future of privacyscanner?

[clemens]

I've been wondering for a while now: Development of both PrivacyScore and privacyscanner seems to have seized completely. Could anyone from the development team give insights regarding the future of these tools? If development has been paused or even stopped, ideally put a transparent statement in the README that says so, so it's transparent to people who come across this repo.

Thanks!

[hprid]

Thank you for bringing up the issue. PrivacyScore and privacyscanner are not dead, but currently the project is somewhat on hold. We seldomly find time to work on it besides our teaching duties and research at university. In the past, I did a lot of work in my spare time on privacyscanner, but in the last months I just feel too tired in the evenings or on weekends to motivate myself. Another contributor is in the final stages of his PhD thesis, so he is also quite busy. So currently all we do is trying to keep the PrivacyScore infrastructure running and to fix problems that prevent scanning, provided that they come to our attention.

That said, there has been some activity that is not publicly visible. I reimplemented the pychrome API to use asyncio, which should help fixing some deadlocks in privacyscanner that are, given the current architecture, not fixable with the thread-based model of pychrome (this issue is sadly not publicly documented). Still missing is the integration of this reimplementation into privacyscanner.

We also have started redesigning the site list and site result page to provide a better overview and more details and some additional features. A student is currently working on bringing this forward. But this also requires some changes in the backend that are still pending.

Also, there is code for better Google Analytics analysis providing more information about which tracker objects are included from which origin etc. This code is unfortunately also not integrated yet, but in a separate file. It was part of our USENIX Security paper: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/maass

Unfortunately, I cannot make any promises when there will be a more steady development or some new release. However, we still have interest in maintaining the project.