Related papers: TrackMeNot: Enhancing the privacy of Web Search
TrackMeNot is a Firefox plugin with laudable intentions - protecting your privacy. By issuing a customizable stream of random search queries on its users' behalf, TrackMeNot surmises that enough search noise will prevent its users' true…
A plethora of contact tracing apps have been developed and deployed in several countries around the world in the battle against Covid-19. However, people are rightfully concerned about the security and privacy risks of such applications. To…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
Dataset obfuscation refers to techniques in which random noise is added to the entries of a given dataset, prior to its public release, to protect against leakage of private information. In this work, dataset obfuscation under two…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
Many popular applications use traces of user data to offer various services to their users. However, even if user data is anonymized and obfuscated, a user's privacy can be compromised through the use of statistical matching techniques that…
Our ability to control the flow of sensitive personal information to online systems is key to trust in personal privacy on the internet. We ask how to detect, assess and defend user privacy in the face of search engine personalisation? We…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, the…
Various modern and highly popular applications make use of user data traces in order to offer specific services, often for the purpose of improving the user's experience while using such applications. However, even when user data is…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
Online tracking is a whack-a-mole game between trackers who build and monetize behavioral user profiles through intrusive data collection, and anti-tracking mechanisms, deployed as a browser extension, built-in to the browser, or as a DNS…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Sensors embedded in mobile smart devices can monitor users' activity with high accuracy to provide a variety of services to end-users ranging from precise geolocation, health monitoring, and handwritten word recognition. However, this…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
Mobile applications continuously generate DNS queries that can reveal sensitive user behavioral patterns even when communications are encrypted. This paper presents a privacy enhancement framework based on query forgery to protect users…
User privacy can be compromised by matching user data traces to records of their previous behavior. The matching of the statistical characteristics of traces to prior user behavior has been widely studied. However, an adversary can also…
With the popularity of smartphones, mobile applications (apps) have penetrated the daily life of people. Although apps provide rich functionalities, they also access a large amount of personal information simultaneously. As a result,…