Related papers: Profiling user activities with minimal traffic tra…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
Stream-based communication dominates today's Internet, posing unique challenges for anonymous communication networks (ACNs). Traditionally designed for independent messages, ACNs struggle to account for the inherent vulnerabilities of…
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers.…
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,…
User tracking on the Internet can come in various forms, e.g., via cookies or by fingerprinting web browsers. A technique that got less attention so far is user tracking based on TLS and specifically based on the TLS session resumption…
In this work we present a measurement study of user mobility in Second Life. We first discuss different techniques to collect user traces and then focus on results obtained using a crawler that we built. Tempted by the question whether our…
Parallel to our physical activities our virtual presence also leaves behind our unique digital fingerprints, while navigating on the Internet. These digital fingerprints have the potential to unveil users' activities encompassing browsing…
Web forms are one of the primary ways to collect personal information online, yet they are relatively under-studied. Unlike web tracking, data collection through web forms is explicit and contextualized. Users (i) are asked to input…
Online user profiling is a very active research field, catalyzing great interest by both scientists and practitioners. In this paper, in particular, we look at approaches able to mine social media activities of users to create a rich user…
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…
Privacy-minded Internet service operators anonymize IPv6 addresses by truncating them to a fixed length, perhaps due to long-standing use of this technique with IPv4 and a belief that it's "good enough." We claim that simple anonymization…
We conduct the most comprehensive study of WLAN traces to date. Measurements collected from four major university campuses are analyzed with the aim of developing fundamental understanding of realistic user behavior in wireless networks.…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Browser fingerprinting is an invasive and opaque stateless tracking technique. Browser vendors, academics, and standards bodies have long struggled to provide meaningful protections against browser fingerprinting that are both accurate and…
Looking into the growth of information in the web it is a very tedious process of getting the exact information the user is looking for. Many search engines generate user profile related data listing. This paper involves one such process…
The most widespread type of phishing attack involves email messages with links pointing to malicious content. Despite user training and the use of detection techniques, these attacks are still highly effective. Recent studies show that it…
Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR), which aims to learn unbiased ranking models from biased user behavior logs, plays an important role in Web search. Previous research on ULTR has studied a variety of biases in users' clicks, such as…
Deep Research systems based on web agents have shown strong potential in solving complex information-seeking tasks, yet their search efficiency remains underexplored. We observe that many state-of-the-art open-source web agents rely on long…
Preserving privacy is an undeniable benefit to users online. However, this benefit (unfortunately) also extends to those who conduct cyber attacks and other types of malfeasance. In this work, we consider the scenario in which Privacy…