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Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Ad targeting is getting more powerful with introduction of new tools, such as Custom Audiences, behavioral targeting, and Audience Insights. Although this is beneficial for businesses as it enables people to receive more relevant…
Google's recent update to the manifest file for Chrome browser extensions, transitioning from manifest version 2 (MV2) to manifest version 3 (MV3), has raised concerns among users and ad blocker providers, who worry that the new…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
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…
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…
Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
Recommendation systems form the center piece of a rapidly growing trillion dollar online advertisement industry. Even with numerous optimizations and approximations, collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches require real-time…
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…
Privacy has been a major concern for everybody over the internet. Governments across the globe have given their views on how the internet space can be managed effectively so that there is some control on the flow of confidential information…
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…
User demand for blocking advertising and tracking online is large and growing. Existing tools, both deployed and described in research, have proven useful, but lack either the completeness or robustness needed for a general solution.…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
Online advertising has typically been more personalized than offline advertising, through the use of machine learning models and real-time auctions for ad targeting. One specific task, predicting the likelihood of conversion (i.e.\ the…