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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…
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from…
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…
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,…
Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web advertising…
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…
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 privacy implications of third-party tracking is a well-studied problem. Recent research has shown that besides data aggregators and behavioral advertisers, online social networks also act as trackers via social widgets. Existing cookie…
A large share of all online display advertisements (ads) are never seen by a human. For instance, an ad could appear below the page fold, where a user never scrolls. Yet, an ad is essentially ineffective if it is not at least somewhat…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web…
Mobile web browsing has recently surpassed desktop browsing both in term of popularity and traffic. Following its desktop counterpart, the mobile browsers ecosystem has been growing from few browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) to a…
This paper examines different reasons the websites may vary in their availability by location. Prior works on availability mostly focus on censorship by nation states. We look at three forms of server-side blocking: blocking visitors from…
Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
In this paper we argue that policies are an increasing concern for organizations that are operating a web site. Examples of policies that are relevant in the domain of the web address issues such as privacy of personal data, accessibility…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…