Related papers: On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Request…

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…

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…

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…

Consumer spending accounts for a large fraction of the US economic activity. Increasingly, consumer activity is moving to the web, where digital traces of shopping and purchases provide valuable data about consumer behavior. We analyze…

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…

Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…

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…

Personalization despite being an effective solution to the problem information overload remains tricky on account of multiple dimensions to consider. Furthermore, the challenge of avoiding overdoing personalization involves estimation of a…

Advertisers are increasingly monitoring people's online behavior and using the information collected to show people individually targeted advertisements. This phenomenon is called online behavioral advertising (OBA). Although advertisers…

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…

Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity,…

Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…

We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…

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…

The task of session search focuses on using interaction data to improve relevance for the user's next query at the session level. In this paper, we formulate session search as a personalization task under the framework of learning to rank.…

This research investigated how online criminal activities can be better understood and connected using data-driven machine learning methods. Many illegal activities, such as human trafficking and illicit trade, have moved to online…

Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…

The tremendous amount of increase in the quantity of information resources available on the web has made the total time that the user spends on a single page very minimal. Users revisiting the same page would be able to fetch the required…

Online services routinely mine user data to predict user preferences, make recommendations, and place targeted ads. Recent research has demonstrated that several private user attributes (such as political affiliation, sexual orientation,…

Every device defines the behavior of various applications running on it with the help of user profiles or settings. What if a user wants different different applications to run in different different networks. Then he cannot do this because…