Related papers: Not All Browsers Are Created Equal: Comparing Web …
With the growing popularity and usage of online social media services, people now have accounts (some times several) on multiple and diverse services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Publicly available information can be used…
Parallel to our physical activities our virtual presence also leaves behind our unique digital fingerprints, while navigating on the Internet. These digital fingerprints have the potential to unveil users' activities encompassing browsing…
The World Wide Web's connectivity is greatly attributed to the HTTP protocol, with HTTP messages offering informative header fields that appeal to disciplines like web security and privacy, especially concerning web tracking. Despite…
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…
Website fingerprinting attack is an extensively studied technique used in a web browser to analyze traffic patterns and thus infer confidential information about users. Several website fingerprinting attacks based on machine learning and…
Web search is an integral part of our daily lives. Recently, there has been a trend of personalization in Web search, where different users receive different results for the same search query. The increasing level of personalization is…
Protecting personal information privacy has become a controversial issue among online social network providers and users. Most social network providers have developed several techniques to decrease threats and risks to the users privacy.…
Conforming to W3C specifications, mobile web browsers allow JavaScript code in a web page to access motion and orientation sensor data without the user's permission. The associated risks to user security and privacy are however not…
With the success of Web applications, most of our data is now stored on various third-party servers where they are processed to deliver personalized services. Naturally we must be authenticated to access this personal information, but the…
Cross-device tracking has drawn growing attention from both commercial companies and the general public because of its privacy implications and applications for user profiling, personalized services, etc. One particular, wide-used type of…
Automated browsers are widely used to study the web at scale. Their premise is that they measure what regular browsers would encounter on the web. In practice, deviations due to detection of automation have been found. To what extent…
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,…
The broad proliferation of mobile devices in recent years has drastically changed the means of accessing the World Wide Web. Describing a shift away from the desktop computer era for content consumption, predictions indicate that the main…
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…
As the Internet help us cross cultural border by providing different information, plagiarism issue is bound to arise. As a result, plagiarism detection becomes more demanding in overcoming this issue. Different plagiarism detection tools…
In this paper we present the Privacy Dashboard -- a tool designed to inform and empower the people using mobile devices, by introducing features such as Remote Privacy Protection, Backup, Adjustable Location Accuracy, Permission Control and…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
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…
Today, smartphone devices are owned by a large portion of the population and have become a very popular platform for accessing the Internet. Smartphones provide the user with immediate access to information and services. However, they can…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…