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This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…

Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…

This paper is concerned with online targeted advertising on social networks. The main technical task we address is to estimate the activation probability for user pairs, which quantifies the influence one user may have on another towards…

Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search…

Compromising social network accounts has become a profitable course of action for cybercriminals. By hijacking control of a popular media or business account, attackers can distribute their malicious messages or disseminate fake information…

Mobile devices with rich features can record videos, traffic parameters or air quality readings along user trajectories. Although such data may be valuable, users are seldom rewarded for collecting them. Emerging digital marketplaces allow…

Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and…

Internet data has surfaced as a primary source for investigation of different aspects of human behavior. A crucial step in such studies is finding a suitable cohort (i.e., a set of users) that shares a common trait of interest to…

Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can infer users' private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates user-item data…

The Personalization of information has taken recommender systems at a very high level. With personalization these systems can generate user specific recommendations accurately and efficiently. User profiling helps personalization, where…

Political advertising on social media has become a central element in election campaigns. However, granular information about political advertising on social media was previously unavailable, thus raising concerns regarding fairness,…

Recommender systems leverage user demographic information, such as age, gender, etc., to personalize recommendations and better place their targeted ads. Oftentimes, users do not volunteer this information due to privacy concerns, or due to…

While smartphone usage become more and more pervasive, people start also asking to which extent such devices can be maliciously exploited as "tracking devices". The concern is not only related to an adversary taking physical or remote…

We propose new privacy attacks to infer attributes (e.g., locations, occupations, and interests) of online social network users. Our attacks leverage seemingly innocent user information that is publicly available in online social networks…

Online services routinely mine user data to predict user preferences, make recommendations, and place targeted ads. Recent research has demonstrated that several private user attributes (such as political affiliation, sexual orientation,…

With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…

Data dashboards are designed to help users manage data collected about them. However, prior work showed that exposure to some dashboards, notably Google's My Activity dashboard, results in significant decreases in perceived concern and…

Our ability to control the flow of sensitive personal information to online systems is key to trust in personal privacy on the internet. We ask how to detect, assess and defend user privacy in the face of search engine personalisation? We…

The public sharing of user information opens the door for adversaries to infer private data, leading to privacy breaches and facilitating malicious activities. While numerous studies have concentrated on privacy leakage via public user…