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We present a new concern when collecting data from individuals that arises from the attempt to mitigate privacy leakage in multiple reporting: tracking of users participating in the data collection via the mechanisms added to provide…
Software systems are ubiquitous, and their use is ingrained in our everyday lives. They enable us to get in touch with people quickly and easily, support us in gathering information, and help us perform our daily tasks. In return, we…
Most search engines can potentially infer the preferences and interests of a user based on her history of search queries. While search engines can use these inferences for a variety of tasks, including targeted advertisements, such tasks do…
This paper summarizes selected results of the dissertation "Beobachtungsm\"oglichkeiten im Domain Name System: Angriffe auf die Privatsph\"are und Techniken zum Selbstdatenschutz". The dissertation provides new technical insights to answer…
End user privacy is a critical concern for all organizations that collect, process and store user data as a part of their business. Privacy concerned users, regulatory bodies and privacy experts continuously demand organizations provide…
Group based anonymization is the most widely studied approach for privacy preserving data publishing. This includes k-anonymity, l-diversity, and t-closeness, to name a few. The goal of this paper is to raise a fundamental issue on the…
In the past two decades, the number of mobile products being created by companies has grown exponentially. However, although these devices are constantly being upgraded with the newest features, the security measures used to protect these…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Personal item tracking devices are popular for locating lost items such as keys, wallets, and suitcases. Originally created to help users find personal items quickly, these devices are now being abused by stalkers and domestic abusers to…
Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…
Many current Internet services rely on inferences from models trained on user data. Commonly, both the training and inference tasks are carried out using cloud resources fed by personal data collected at scale from users. Holding and using…
Recommender systems are essential for personalizing digital experiences on e-commerce sites, streaming services, and social media platforms. While these systems are necessary for modern digital interactions, they face fairness, bias,…
Although there are privacy-enhancing tools designed to protect users' online privacy, it is surprising to see a lack of user-centric solutions allowing privacy control based on the joint assessment of privacy risks and benefits, due to data…
Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the…
Given the importance of privacy, many Internet protocols are nowadays designed with privacy in mind (e.g., using TLS for confidentiality). Foreseeing all privacy issues at the time of protocol design is, however, challenging and may become…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
Network traffic analysis using AI (machine learning and deep learning) models made significant progress over the past decades. Traffic analysis addresses various challenging problems in network security, ranging from detection of anomalies…
In real-world social networks, there is an increasing interest in tracking the evolution of groups of users and detecting the various changes they are liable to undergo. Several approaches have been proposed for this. In studying these…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…