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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…

Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition…

We identify class of covert channels in browsers that are not mitigated by current defenses, which we call "pool-party" attacks. Pool-party attacks allow sites to create covert channels by manipulating limited-but-unpartitioned resource…

Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…

While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…

Health information websites offer instantaneous access to information, but have important privacy implications as they can associate a visitor with specific medical conditions. We interviewed 35 residents of Canada to better understand…

Various in-browser privacy protection techniques have been designed to protect end-users from third-party tracking. In an arms race against these counter-measures, the tracking providers developed a new technique called CNAME cloaking based…

Since the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 more than 60 % of popular websites in Europe display cookie consent notices to their visitors. This has quickly led to users becoming fatigued with privacy…

The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…

A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on evaluating the user interface (UI) design…

Social media platforms curate access to information and opportunities, and so play a critical role in shaping public discourse today. The opaque nature of the algorithms these platforms use to curate content raises societal questions. Prior…

This paper investigates the accessibility of cookie notices on websites for users with visual impairments (VI) via a set of system studies on top UK websites (n=46) and a user study (n=100). We use a set of methods and tools--including…

Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws…

We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…

The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…

Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online…

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…

Browser extensions are additional tools developed by third parties that integrate with web browsers to extend their functionality beyond standard capabilities. However, the browser extension platform is increasingly being exploited by…

The research community has deemed cookie synchronization detection an inherently challenging task. Studies aiming to identify cookie synchronizations often share high-level design choices, but deviate amongst low-level implementations. For…

TrackMeNot is a Firefox plugin with laudable intentions - protecting your privacy. By issuing a customizable stream of random search queries on its users' behalf, TrackMeNot surmises that enough search noise will prevent its users' true…