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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…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of global web usage patterns based on data from SimilarWeb, a leading source for estimating web traffic. Leveraging a dataset comprising over 250,000 websites, we estimate the total web traffic…
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological…
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…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
The emergence of new digital technologies has allowed the study of human behaviour at a scale and at level of granularity that were unthinkable just a decade ago. In particular, by analysing the digital traces left by people interacting in…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…
Getting deeper insights into the online browsing behavior of Web users has been a major research topic since the advent of the WWW. It provides useful information to optimize website design, Web browser design, search engines offerings, and…
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…
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…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
Internet users today are constantly giving away their personal information and privacy through social media, tracking cookies, 'free' email, and single sign-on authentication in order to access convenient online services. Unfortunately, the…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
How easy is it to uniquely identify a person based solely on their web browsing behavior? Here we show that when people navigate the Web, their online traces produce fingerprints that identify them. Merely the four most visited web domains…