Related papers: Anatomy of the Third-Party Web Tracking Ecosystem
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
Online tracking is a primary concern for Internet users, yet previous research has not found a clear link between the cognitive understanding of tracking and protective actions. We postulate that protective behaviour follows affective…
The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial clustering of…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
We turn our attention to the elephant in the room of data protection, which is none other than the simple and obvious question: "Who's tracking sensitive domains?". Despite a fast-growing amount of work on more complex facets of the…
The privacy implications of third-party tracking is a well-studied problem. Recent research has shown that besides data aggregators and behavioral advertisers, online social networks also act as trackers via social widgets. Existing cookie…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
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…
This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
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,…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…
`Tracking' is the collection of data about an individual's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. This paper aims to…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
The recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that when obtaining information online that could be used to identify individuals, their consents must be obtained. Among other things, this affects many common…
Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is…