Related papers: Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and C…
When companies release marketing materials aimed at promoting their privacy practices or highlighting specific privacy features, what do they actually communicate to consumers? In this paper, we explore the impact of privacy marketing on:…
Media publisher platforms often face an effectiveness-nuisance tradeoff: more annoying ads can be more effective for some advertisers because of their ability to attract attention, but after attracting viewers' attention, their nuisance to…
We investigate adblocking filters and the extent to which websites and advertisers react when their content is impacted by these filters. We collected data daily from the Alexa Top-5000 web sites for 120 days, and from specific sites that…
The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is partially due to the precise targeting features they offer. Although researchers and journalists have found many ways that advertisers can target---or exclude---particular…
While attracting attention is one of the prime goals of content providers, the conversion of that attention into revenue is by no means obvious. Given that most users expect to consume web content for free, a provider with an established…
Companies that have an online presence-in particular, companies that are exclusively digital-often subscribe to this business model: collect data from the user base, then expose the data to advertisement agencies in order to turn a profit.…
Social advertising (or social promotion) is an effective approach that produces a significant cascade of adoption through influence in the online social networks. The goal of this work is to optimize the ad allocation from the platform's…
We study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing…
The industry for children's apps is thriving at the cost of children's privacy: these apps routinely disclose children's data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to…
Modern web browsers have accrued an incredibly broad set of features since being invented for hypermedia dissemination in 1990. Many of these features benefit users by enabling new types of web applications. However, some features also…
Most websites offer their content for free, though this gratuity often comes with a counterpart: personal data is collected to finance these websites by resorting, mostly, to tracking and thus targeted advertising. Cookie walls and…
A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…
This representative study of German search engine users (N=1,000) focuses on the ability of users to distinguish between organic results and advertisements on Google results pages. We combine questions about Google's business with…
Social media 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…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…
Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of…
Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, can these entities…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
Faced with the challenge of attracting user attention and revenue, social media websites have turned to video advertisements (video-ads). While in traditional media the video-ad market is mostly based on an interaction between content…
Ads are an important revenue source for mobile app development, especially for free apps, whose expense can be compensated by ad revenue. The ad benefits also carry with costs. For example, too many ads can interfere the user experience,…