Related papers: On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Request…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
With the rapid development of the internet and the explosion of information, providing users with accurate personalized recommendations has become an important research topic. This paper designs and analyzes a personalized recommendation…
Online privacy has become increasingly important in recent years. While third-party cookies have been widely used for years, they have also been criticized for their potential impact on user privacy. They can be used by advertisers to track…
Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
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…
Users of electronic devices, e.g., laptop, smartphone, etc. have characteristic behaviors while surfing the Web. Profiling this behavior can help identify the person using a given device. In this paper, we introduce a technique to profile…
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…
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…
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…
Audience interest, demography, purchase behavior and other possible classifications are ex- tremely important factors to be carefully studied in a targeting campaign. This information can help advertisers and publishers deliver…
Online social networks have enabled new methods and modalities of collaboration and sharing. These advances bring privacy concerns: online social data is more accessible and persistent and simultaneously less contextualized than traditional…
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics…
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…
With the recent digital revolution, analyzing of tourists' behaviors and research fields associated with it have changed profoundly. It is now easier to examine behaviors of tourists using digital traces they leave during their travels. The…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
E-commerce businesses employ recommender models to assist in identifying a personalized set of products for each visitor. To accurately assess the recommendations' influence on customer clicks and buys, three target areas -- customer…
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…
Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…
Analysis of aggregate Web traffic has shown that PageRank is a poor model of how people actually navigate the Web. Using the empirical traffic patterns generated by a thousand users over the course of two months, we characterize the…