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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…
The amount of personal information unwillingly exposed by users on online social networks is staggering, as shown in recent research. Moreover, recent reports indicate that these networks are infested with tens of millions of fake users…
Online tracking is a primary concern for Internet users, yet previous research has not found a clear link between the cognitive understanding of tracking and protective actions. We postulate that protective behaviour follows affective…
Online advertisements that masquerade as non-advertising content pose numerous risks to users. Such hidden advertisements appear on social media platforms when content creators or "influencers" endorse products and brands in their content.…
Despite having growing awareness and concerns about privacy, technology users are often insufficiently informed of the data practices of various digital products to protect themselves. Privacy policies and privacy labels, as two…
Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking…
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…
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…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
To promote engagement, recommendation algorithms on platforms like YouTube increasingly personalize users' feeds, limiting users' exposure to diverse content and depriving them of opportunities to reflect on their interests compared to…
Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid…
The ever increasing popularity of Facebook and other Online Social Networks has left a wealth of personal and private data on the web, aggregated and readily accessible for broad and automatic retrieval. Protection from both undesired…
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) secures the right to Opt-Out for consumers in California. However, websites may implement complex consent mechanisms that potentially do not capture the user's true choices. We investigated the…
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies --…
Tracking pixels are used to optimize online ad campaigns through personalization, re-targeting, and conversion tracking. Past research has primarily focused on detecting the prevalence of tracking pixels on the web, with limited attention…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Web-based chatbots provide website owners with the benefits of increased sales, immediate response to their customers, and insight into customer behaviour. While Web-based chatbots are getting popular, they have not received much scrutiny…
India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We…
Contact tracing apps have become one of the main approaches to control and slow down the spread of COVID-19 and ease up lockdown measures. While these apps can be very effective in stopping the transmission chain and saving lives, their…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…