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Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
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…
Targeted advertising is meant to improve the efficiency of matching advertisers to their customers. However, targeted advertising can also be abused by malicious advertisers to efficiently reach people susceptible to false stories, stoke…
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…
Over the past decade, advertising has emerged as the primary source of revenue for many web sites and apps. In this paper we report a first-of-its-kind study that seeks to broadly understand the features, mechanisms and dynamics of display…
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.…
Google's Ad Settings shows the gender and age that Google has inferred about a web user. We compare the inferred values to the self-reported values of 501 survey participants. We find that Google often does not show an inference, but when…
As predictive models are increasingly being employed to make consequential decisions, there is a growing emphasis on developing techniques that can provide algorithmic recourse to affected individuals. While such recourses can be immensely…
To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores…
Digital commerce thrives on advertising, with many of the largest technology companies relying on it as a significant source of revenue. However, in the context of information-seeking behavior, such as search, advertising may degrade the…
Google and Apple have jointly provided an API for exposure notification in order to implement decentralized contract tracing apps using Bluetooth Low Energy, the so-called "Google/Apple Proposal", which we abbreviate by "GAP". We…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Today's Web services - such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook - leverage user data for varied purposes, including personalizing recommendations, targeting advertisements, and adjusting prices. At present, users have little insight into how…
User profiling, the practice of collecting user information for personalized recommendations, has become widespread, driving progress in technology. However, this growth poses a threat to user privacy, as devices often collect sensitive…
Online mobile advertising ecosystems provide advertising and analytics services that collect, aggregate, process, and trade a rich amount of consumers' personal data and carry out interest-based ad targeting, which raised serious privacy…
Web tracking through third-party cookies is considered a threat to users' privacy and is supposed to be abandoned in the near future. Recently, Google proposed the Topics API framework as a privacy-friendly alternative for behavioural…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
Online advertising has become the backbone of the Internet economy by revolutionizing business marketing. It provides a simple and efficient way for advertisers to display their advertisements to specific individual users, and over the last…