Related papers: The Case for a General and Interaction-based Third…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
Web cookies are ubiquitously used to track and profile the behavior of users. Although there is a solid empirical foundation for understanding the use of cookies in the global world wide web, thus far, limited attention has been devoted for…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
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…
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 --…
In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites to…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
Web applications often include third-party content and scripts to personalize a user's online experience. These scripts have unrestricted access to a user's private data stored in the browser's persistent storage like cookies, localstorage…
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,…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
Third-party tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is a significant and ubiquitous privacy threat in mobile apps. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to protect…
Third-party cookies have been a privacy concern since cookies were first developed in the mid 1990s, but more strict cookie policies were only introduced by Internet browser vendors in the early 2010s. More recently, due to regulatory…
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…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
Content filtering in web browsers is a tedious process for most of the people, because of several reasons. By blocking JavaScript, Cookies and Popups, end users can ensure maximum protection from browser based attacks and vulnerabilities.…
With the impending removal of third-party cookies from major browsers and the introduction of new privacy-preserving advertising APIs, the research community has a timely opportunity to assist industry in qualitatively improving the Web's…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…