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Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
Online users generate tremendous amounts of data. To better serve users, it is required to share the user-related data among researchers, advertisers and application developers. Publishing such data would raise more concerns on user…
Whistleblower laws protect individuals who inform the public or an authority about governmental or corporate misconduct. Despite these laws, whistleblowers frequently risk reprisals and sites such as WikiLeaks emerged to provide a level of…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
Online advertising is progressively moving towards a programmatic model in which ads are matched to actual interests of individuals collected as they browse the web. Letting the huge debate around privacy aside, a very important question in…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
Thanks to the wide range of features offered by web browsers, modern websites include various types of content such as JavaScript and CSS in order to create interactive user interfaces. Browser vendors also provided extensions to enhance…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
Over the past decade, advertising has emerged as the primary source of revenue for many web sites and apps. In this paper we report a first-of-its-kind study that seeks to broadly understand the features, mechanisms and dynamics of display…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
Browser extensions are small applications executed in the browser context that provide additional capabilities and enrich the user experience while surfing the web. The acceptance of extensions in current browsers is unquestionable. For…
Cookie banners are devices implemented by websites to allow users to manage their privacy settings with respect to the use of cookies. They are part of a user's daily web browsing experience since legislation in Europe requires websites to…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
Content filtering in web browsers is a tedious process for most of the people, because of several reasons. By blocking JavaScript, Cookies and Popups, end users can ensure maximum protection from browser based attacks and vulnerabilities.…
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…
Online advertising represents a main instrument for publishers to fund content on the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, a significant number of online advertisements often accommodates potentially malicious content, such as cryptojacking…
The use of the internet, and in particular web browsing, offers many potential advantages for educational institutions as students have access to a wide range of information previously not available. However, there are potential negative…