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While privacy-focused browsers have taken steps to block third-party cookies and mitigate browser fingerprinting, novel tracking techniques that can bypass existing countermeasures continue to emerge. Since trackers need to share…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
While third-party cookies have been a key component of the digital marketing ecosystem for years, they allow users to be tracked across web sites in ways that raise serious privacy concerns. Google has proposed the Privacy Sandbox…
Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…
Software privacy provides the ability to limit data access to unauthorized parties. Privacy is achieved through different means, such as implementing GDPR into software applications. However, previous research revealed that the lack of poor…
Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the…
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
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…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
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,…
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can infer private user attributes (e.g., age, location, gender) from user-generated text shared online, enabling rapid and large-scale privacy breaches. Existing…
Much of the recent excitement around decentralized finance (DeFi) comes from hopes that DeFi can be a secure, private, less centralized alternative to traditional finance systems. However, people moving to DeFi sites in hopes of improving…
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'…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…
Website fingerprinting is an attack that uses size and timing characteristics of encrypted downloads to identify targeted websites. Since this can defeat the privacy goals of anonymity networks such as Tor, many algorithms to defend against…
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
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…