Related papers: Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and C…
Online advertising is the major source of income for a large portion of Internet Services. There exists a body of literature aiming at optimizing ads engagement, understanding the privacy and ethical implications of online advertising, etc.…
The recent advances of web-based cryptomining libraries along with the whopping market value of cryptocoins have convinced an increasing number of publishers to switch to web mining as a source of monetization for their websites. The…
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…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
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…
A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the…
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…
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…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
Cache advertisements reduce the access cost by allowing users to skip the cache when it does not contain their datum. Such advertisements are used in multiple networked domains such as 5G networks, wide area networks, and…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…
The use of sponsored product listings in prominent positions of consumer search results has made e-commerce platforms, which traditionally serve as marketplaces for third-party sellers to reach consumers, a major medium for those sellers to…
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…
Online political advertising has grown significantly over the last few years. To monitor online sponsored political discourse, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created public Ad Libraries collecting the political ads…
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…
A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the…