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Search engines are used and trusted by hundreds of millions of people every day. However, the algorithms used by search engines to index, filter, and rank web content are inherently biased, and will necessarily prefer some views and…
The exchange of personal information in digital environments poses significant risks, including identity theft, privacy breaches, and data misuse. Addressing these challenges requires a deep understanding of user behavior and mental models…
In previous work, we presented a novel information-theoretic privacy criterion for query forgery in the domain of information retrieval. Our criterion measured privacy risk as a divergence between the user's and the population's query…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Web services commonly employ Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) for performance and security. As web traffic is becoming 100% HTTPS, more and more websites allow CDNs to terminate their HTTPS connections. This practice may expose a…
Social media's growing popularity raises concerns around children's online safety. Interactions between minors and adults with predatory intentions is a particularly grave concern. Research into online sexual grooming has often relied on…
Social media has become an essential part of the daily routines of children and adolescents. Moreover, enormous efforts have been made to ensure the psychological and emotional well-being of young users as well as their safety when…
The increased use of online social networks for the dissemination of information comes with the misuse of the internet for cyberbullying, cybercrime, spam, vandalism, amongst other things. To proactively identify abuse in the networks, we…
Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and…
Search and recommender systems that take the initiative to ask clarifying questions to better understand users' information needs are receiving increasing attention from the research community. However, to the best of our knowledge, there…
One of the most important humanitarian responsibility of every individual is to protect the future of our children. This entails not only protection of physical welfare but also from ill events that can potentially affect the mental…
Web search engines are frequently used to access information about products. This has increased in recent times with the rising popularity of e-commerce. However, there is limited understanding of what users search for and their intents…
In mobile applications, Pop-up window (PoW) plays a crucial role in improving user experience, guiding user actions, and delivering key information. Unfortunately, the excessive use of PoWs severely degrades the user experience. These PoWs…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
In the past few years, IRC bots, malicious programs which are remotely controlled by the attacker through IRC servers, have become a major threat to the Internet and users. These bots can be used in different malicious ways such as issuing…
Differential privacy offers formal quantitative guarantees for algorithms over datasets, but it assumes attackers that know and can influence all but one record in the database. This assumption often vastly overapproximates the attackers'…
The paper has two objectives. The first is to study rigorously the transient behavior of some P2P networks whenever information is replicated and disseminated according to epidemic-like dynamics. The second is to use the insight gained from…
The peer-to-peer (P2P) economy relies on establishing trust in distributed networked systems, where the reliability of a user is assessed through digital peer-review processes that aggregate ratings into reputation scores. Here we present…
Peer to peer (P2P) networks are an overlay on IP network of the internet and they can shape the future of computing by their involvement in distributed systems with the increased of use of low priced personal computers to form big clusters…
The rise in phishing attacks via e-mail and short message service (SMS) has not slowed down at all. The first thing we need to do to combat the ever-increasing number of phishing attacks is to collect and characterize more phishing cases…