Related papers: TrackMeNot-so-good-after-all
Many tracking companies collect user data and sell it to data markets and advertisers. While they claim to protect user privacy by anonymizing the data, our research reveals that significant privacy risks persist even with anonymized data.…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
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…
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web.…
Mobile crowdsensing has emerged as an efficient sensing paradigm which combines the crowd intelligence and the sensing power of mobile devices, e.g.,~mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets. This article addresses the…
Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity,…
Any on-demand pseudonym acquisition strategy is problematic should the connectivity to the credential management infrastructure be intermittent. If a vehicle runs out of pseudonyms with no connectivity to refill its pseudonym pool, one…
HTTP client hints are a set of standardized HTTP request headers designed to modernize and potentially replace the traditional user agent string. While the user agent string exposes a wide range of information about the client's browser and…
Releasing Web query logs which contain valuable information for research or marketing, can breach the privacy of search engine users. Therefore rendering query logs to limit linking a query to an individual while preserving the data…
Context: As mobile applications (Apps) widely spread over our society and life, various personal information is constantly demanded by Apps in exchange for more intelligent and customized functionality. An increasing number of users are…
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…
Crowd sensing is a new paradigm which leverages the pervasive smartphones to efficiently collect sensing data, enabling numerous novel applications. To achieve good service quality for a crowd sensing application, incentive mechanisms are…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Targeted advertising is fueled by the comprehensive tracking of users' online activity. As a result, advertising companies, such as Google and Meta, encourage website administrators to not only install tracking scripts on their websites but…
WebAssembly (wasm) has recently emerged as a promisingly portable, size-efficient, fast, and safe binary format for the web. As WebAssembly can interact freely with JavaScript libraries, this gives rise to a potential for undesirable…
Object tracking, especially animal tracking, is one of the key topics that attract a lot of attention due to its benefits of animal behavior understanding and monitoring. Recent state-of-the-art tracking methods are founded on deep learning…
Monitoring concurrent programs typically rely on collecting traces to abstract program executions. However, existing approaches targeting general behavioral properties are either not tailored for online monitoring, are no longer maintained,…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
Preserving user privacy is paramount when it comes to publicly disclosed datasets that contain fine-grained data about large populations. The problem is especially critical in the case of mobile traffic datasets collected by cellular…