Related papers: Anatomy of the Third-Party Web Tracking Ecosystem
Networking research, especially focusing on human mobility, has evolved significantly in the last two decades and now relies on collection and analyzing larger datasets. The increasing sizes of datasets are enabled by larger automated…
An increasing number of countries are passing laws that facilitate the mass surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, governments and citizens are increasingly paying attention to the countries that their Internet traffic traverses. In…
Over the past decade, Internet centralization and its implications for both people and the resilience of the Internet has become a topic of active debate. While the networking community informally agrees on the definition of centralization,…
Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to…
Open access WiFi hotspots are widely deployed in many public places, including restaurants, parks, coffee shops, shopping malls, trains, airports, hotels, and libraries. While these hotspots provide an attractive option to stay connected,…
The outbreak of viruses have necessitated contact tracing and infection tracking methods. Despite various efforts, there is currently no standard scheme for the tracing and tracking. Many nations of the world have therefore, developed their…
The description of complex human mobility patterns is at the core of many important applications ranging from urbanism and transportation to epidemics containment. Data about collective human movements, once scarce, has become widely…
Since the beginning of 2020, the novel coronavirus has begun to sweep across the globe. Given the prevalence of smartphones everywhere, many countries across continents also developed COVID-19 contract tracing apps that users can install to…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Firms collect vast amounts of behavioral and geographical data on individuals. While behavioral data captures an individual's digital footprint, geographical data reflects their physical footprint. Given the significant privacy risks…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of global web usage patterns based on data from SimilarWeb, a leading source for estimating web traffic. Leveraging a dataset comprising over 250,000 websites, we estimate the total web traffic…
The privacy community has a long track record of investigating emerging types of web tracking techniques. Recent work has focused on compliance of web trackers with new privacy laws such as Europe's GDPR and California's CCPA. Despite the…
With the ubiquitous use of location-based services, large-scale individual-level location data has been widely collected through location-awareness devices. The widespread exposure of such location data poses significant privacy risks to…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
The internet is a common place for businesses to collect and store as much client data as possible and computer storage capacity has increased exponentially due to this trend. Businesses utilize this data to enhance customer satisfaction,…
While many studies have looked at privacy properties of the Android and Google Play app ecosystem, comparatively much less is known about iOS and the Apple App Store, the most widely used ecosystem in the US. At the same time, there is…
Due to their essential role as places for socialization, "third places" - social places where people casually visit and communicate with friends and neighbors - have been studied by a wide range of fields including network science,…
With much of our lives taking place online, researchers are increasingly turning to information from the World Wide Web to gain insights into geographic patterns and processes. Web scraping as an online data acquisition technique allows us…
Understanding where Internet services are hosted, and how users reach them, has captured the interest of government regulators and others concerned with the privacy of data flows. In this paper we focus on government websites -- services…
In the past decade, global warming made several headlines and turned the attention of the whole world to it. Carbon footprint is the main factor that drives greenhouse emissions up and results in the temperature increase of the planet with…