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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…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Our online lives generate a wealth of behavioral records -'digital footprints'- which are stored and leveraged by technology platforms. This data can be used to create value for users by personalizing services. At the same time, however, it…
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…
In the past years, many proposals have emerged in order to address online advertising use-cases without access to third-party cookies. All these proposals leverage some privacy-enhancing technologies such as aggregation or differential…
Recommender systems are essential for personalizing digital experiences on e-commerce sites, streaming services, and social media platforms. While these systems are necessary for modern digital interactions, they face fairness, bias,…
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…
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.…
Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Online advertising is a cornerstone of the Internet ecosystem, with advertising measurement playing a crucial role in optimizing efficiency. Ad measurement entails attributing desired behaviors, such as purchases, to ad exposures across…
Recently, privacy issues in web services that rely on users' personal data have raised great attention. Unlike existing privacy-preserving technologies such as federated learning and differential privacy, we explore another way to mitigate…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
Online trackers personalize ads campaigns, exponentially increasing their efficacy compared to traditional channels. The downside of this is that thousands of mostly unknown systems own our profiles and violate our privacy without our…
Companies that have an online presence-in particular, companies that are exclusively digital-often subscribe to this business model: collect data from the user base, then expose the data to advertisement agencies in order to turn a profit.…
In the last decade, the advertisement market spread significantly in the web and mobile app system. Its effectiveness is also due thanks to the possibility to target the advertisement on the specific interests of the actual user, other than…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
This paper presents a practical side-channel attack that identifies the social web service account of a visitor to an attacker's website. Our attack leverages the widely adopted user-blocking mechanism, abusing its inherent property that…
Nowadays, mobile users have a vast number of applications and services at their disposal. Each of these might impose some privacy threats on users' "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII). Location privacy is a crucial part of PII, and…