Related papers: MyTrackingChoices: Pacifying the Ad-Block War by E…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers' Web browsing data without their consent.…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in adblocker use, driven by increased web tracking and personalized ads. However, a significant issue for adblocker users is the web breakages they encounter, which worsens their browsing experience and…
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 fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although users can access most of the web services free of charge, they pay a heavy coston their privacy. They are forced to trust third parties and intermediaries, who not…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
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…
In 2020, Google announced it would disable third-party cookies in the Chrome browser to improve user privacy. In order to continue to enable interest-based advertising while mitigating risks of individualized user tracking, Google proposed…
Contact tracing apps have become one of the main approaches to control and slow down the spread of COVID-19 and ease up lockdown measures. While these apps can be very effective in stopping the transmission chain and saving lives, their…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to…
Real-time, online-editing web apps provide free and convenient services for collaboratively editing, sharing and storing files. The benefits of these web applications do not come for free: not only do service providers have full access to…
On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…
During the past few years, mostly as a result of the GDPR and the CCPA, websites have started to present users with cookie consent banners. These banners are web forms where the users can state their preference and declare which cookies…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web.…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, the…
This paper initiates the study of the testable implications of choice data in settings where agents have privacy preferences. We adapt the standard conceptualization of consumer choice theory to a situation where the consumer is aware of,…