Related papers: Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defens…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…
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…
Website fingerprinting attacks, which use statistical analysis on network traffic to compromise user privacy, have been shown to be effective even if the traffic is sent over anonymity-preserving networks such as Tor. The classical attack…
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…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
Online tracking is a whack-a-mole game between trackers who build and monetize behavioral user profiles through intrusive data collection, and anti-tracking mechanisms, deployed as a browser extension, built-in to the browser, or as a DNS…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
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,…
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…
The primary objective of an anonymity tool is to protect the anonymity of its users through the implementation of strong encryption and obfuscation techniques. As a result, it becomes very difficult to monitor and identify users activities…
The possibility of fingerprinting the search keywords issued by a user on popular web search engines is a significant threat to user privacy. This threat has received surprisingly little attention in the network traffic analysis literature.…
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…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Current consumer-protection debates focus on the powerful new data-analysis techniques that have disrupted the balance of power between companies and their customers. Online tracking enables sellers to amass troves of historical data, apply…
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 --…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
During the past few years, mostly as a result of the GDPR and the CCPA, websites have started to present users with cookie consent banners. These banners are web forms where the users can state their preference and declare which cookies…
Many tracking companies collect user data and sell it to data markets and advertisers. While they claim to protect user privacy by anonymizing the data, our research reveals that significant privacy risks persist even with anonymized data.…