Related papers: MyTrackingChoices: Pacifying the Ad-Block War by E…
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web…
Applications (apps) of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, have become a main enabler of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies. However, the complex exchange of goods, services,…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
Governments and researchers around the world are implementing digital contact tracing solutions to stem the spread of infectious disease, namely COVID-19. Many of these solutions threaten individual rights and privacy. Our goal is to break…
Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
Recommender systems have been widely used in different application domains including energy-preservation, e-commerce, healthcare, social media, etc. Such applications require the analysis and mining of massive amounts of various types of…
In order to preserve the possibility of an Internet that is free at the point of use, attention is turning to new solutions that would allow targeted advertisement delivery based on behavioral information such as user preferences, without…
For preserving privacy, blockchains can be equipped with dedicated mechanisms to anonymize participants. However, these mechanism often take only the abstraction layer of blockchains into account whereas observations of the underlying…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
As technology and technology companies have grown in power, ubiquity, and societal influence, some companies -- and notably some mobile apps -- have come to be perceived as privacy threats. Prior work has considered how various factors…
We present a systematic study of ad blocking - and the associated "arms race" - as a security problem. We model ad blocking as a state space with four states and six state transitions, which correspond to techniques that can be deployed by…
A variety of tools have been introduced recently that are designed to help people protect their privacy on the Internet. These tools perform many different functions in-cluding encrypting and/or anonymizing communications, preventing the…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Content filtering in web browsers is a tedious process for most of the people, because of several reasons. By blocking JavaScript, Cookies and Popups, end users can ensure maximum protection from browser based attacks and vulnerabilities.…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
Online mobile advertising ecosystems provide advertising and analytics services that collect, aggregate, process, and trade a rich amount of consumers' personal data and carry out interest-based ad targeting, which raised serious privacy…
Stalkerware is a serious threat to individuals' privacy that is receiving increased attention from the security and privacy research communities. Existing works have largely focused on studying leading stalkerware apps, dual-purpose apps,…