Related papers: Anatomy of the Third-Party Web Tracking Ecosystem
Powerful recognition algorithms are widely used in the Internet or important medical systems, which poses a serious threat to personal privacy. Although the law provides for diversity protection, e.g. The General Data Protection Regulation…
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…
The internet can be broadly divided into three parts: surface, deep and dark. The dark web has become notorious in the media for being a hidden part of the web where all manner of illegal activities take place. This review investigates how…
Data collection and aggregation by online services happens to an extent that is often beyond awareness and comprehension of its users. Transparency tools become crucial to inform people, though it is unclear how well they work. To…
Stateful and stateless web tracking gathered much attention in the last decade, however they were always measured separately. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to detect and measure cookie respawning with browser and…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
Advertisements generate huge chunks of revenues for websites and online businesses. Ad-blocker and tracker blocking programs have gained momentum in the last few years with massive debates raging on privacy concerns and improving user…
The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
The digital age has brought a world of opportunity to children. Connectivity can be a game-changer for some of the world's most marginalized children. However, while legislatures around the world have enacted regulations to protect…
Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws…
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…
The emergence of new digital technologies has allowed the study of human behaviour at a scale and at level of granularity that were unthinkable just a decade ago. In particular, by analysing the digital traces left by people interacting in…
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of networks and clusters in the global economy. Despite being a popular research topic in economics, sociology and urban studies, geographical clustering of human activity has…
For centuries, humanity wondered if there were other worlds like ours in the Universe. For about a quarter of a century, we have known that planetary systems exist around other stars, and more than 3800 exoplanetary systems have been…
Despite being an integral tool for finding health-related information online, YouTube has faced criticism for disseminating COVID-19 misinformation globally to its users. Yet, prior audit studies have predominantly investigated YouTube…
Personal data includes the digital footprints that we leave behind as part of our everyday activities, both online and offline in the real world. It includes data we collect ourselves, such as from wearables, as well as the data collected…
Economic growth is conventionally analyzed at the national level, yet cities generate the bulk of global output. Here we construct GDP trajectories for 8,808 functional urban areas (FUAs) across 165 countries over 1993-2019 using…
Understanding web co-location is essential for various reasons. For instance, it can help one to assess the collateral damage that denial-of-service attacks or IP-based blocking can cause to the availability of co-located web sites.…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…