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The targeted direct-to-customer marketing of unapproved stem cell treatments by a questionable online industry is directed at vulnerable users who search the Internet in the hope of a cure. This behavior especially poses a threat to…
Various modern and highly popular applications make use of user data traces in order to offer specific services, often for the purpose of improving the user's experience while using such applications. However, even when user data is…
Major advertising platforms recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers' access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to…
Personal data collected at scale promises to improve decision-making and accelerate innovation. However, sharing and using such data raises serious privacy concerns. A promising solution is to produce synthetic data, artificial records to…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
With the advent of the Internet, search engines have begun sprouting like mushrooms after a rainfall. Only in recent years, have developers become more innovative, and came up with guided searching facilities online. The goals of these…
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…
Prior work on personalizing web search results has focused on considering query-and-click logs to capture users individual interests. For product search, extensive user histories about purchases and ratings have been exploited. However, for…
Tag Management Systems were developed in order to support website publishers in installing multiple third-party JavaScript scripts (Tags) on their websites. Google developed its own TMS called ``Google Tag Manager'' (GTM) that is currently…
Systems aiming to aid consumers in their decision-making (e.g., by implementing persuasive techniques) are more likely to be effective when consumers trust them. However, recent research has demonstrated that the machine learning algorithms…
Recommender systems play a crucial role in helping users to find their interested information in various web services such as Amazon, YouTube, and Google News. Various recommender systems, ranging from neighborhood-based,…
We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…
Advertising, long the financial mainstay of the web ecosystem, has become nearly ubiquitous in the world of mobile apps. While ad targeting on the web is fairly well understood, mobile ad targeting is much less studied. In this paper, we…
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…
We undertake a formal study of the value of targeting data to an advertiser. As expected, this value is increasing in the utility difference between realizations of the targeting data and the accuracy of the data, and depends on the…
The increased popularity and ubiquitous availability of online social networks and globalised Internet access have affected the way in which people share content. The information that users willingly disclose on these platforms can be used…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
With smartphone technologies enhanced way of interacting with the world around us, it has also been paving the way for easier access to our private and personal information. This has been amplified by the existence of numerous embedded…
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…
Location privacy has been extensively studied in the literature. However, existing location privacy models are either not rigorous or not customizable, which limits the trade-off between privacy and utility in many real-world applications.…