Related papers: Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defens…
Our online lives generate a wealth of behavioral records -'digital footprints'- which are stored and leveraged by technology platforms. This data can be used to create value for users by personalizing services. At the same time, however, it…
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…
The recent decade has witnessed phenomenal growth in communication technology. Development of user-friendly software platforms, such as Facebook, WhatsApp etc. have facilitated ease of communication and thereby people have started freely…
Digital contact tracing has emerged as a viable tool supplementing manual contact tracing. To date, more than 100 contact tracing applications have been published to slow down the spread of highly contagious Covid-19. Despite subtle…
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 much current web privacy research focuses on browser fingerprinting, the boring fact is that the majority of current third-party web tracking is conducted using traditional, persistent-state identifiers. One possible explanation for…
Modern browsers give access to several attributes that can be collected to form a browser fingerprint. Although browser fingerprints have primarily been studied as a web tracking tool, they can contribute to improve the current state of web…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
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…
Over the years, use of smartphones has come to dominate several areas, improving our lives, offering us convenience, and reshaping our daily work circumstances. Beyond traditional use for communication, they are used for many peripheral…
Adversaries are abusing Internet security and privacy services to execute cyber attacks. To cope with these threats, network operators utilize various security tools and techniques to monitor the cyber space. An efficient way to infer…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, the…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless tracking technique that attempts to combine information exposed by multiple different web APIs to create a unique identifier for tracking users across the web. Over the last decade, trackers have abused…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
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…
Recent work in traffic analysis has shown that traffic patterns leaked through side channels can be used to recover important semantic information. For instance, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is…
The Tor network provides users with strong anonymity by routing their internet traffic through multiple relays. While Tor encrypts traffic and hides IP addresses, it remains vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks such as the website…
Privacy policies are legal documents that describe how a website will collect, use, and distribute a user's data. Unfortunately, such documents are often overly complicated and filled with legal jargon; making it difficult for users to…
The web is the prominent way information is exchanged in the 21st century. However, ensuring web-based information is accessible is complicated, particularly with web applications that rely on JavaScript and other technologies to deliver…