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In-browser cryptojacking involves hijacking the CPU power of a website's visitor to perform CPU-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and has been on the rise, with 8500% growth during 2017. While some websites advocate cryptojacking as a…
The ongoing debate over net neutrality covers a broad set of issues related to the regulation of public networks. In two ways, we extend an idealized usage-priced game-theoretic framework based on a common linear demand-response model.…
Detailed targeting of advertisements has long been one of the core offerings of online platforms. Unfortunately, malicious advertisers have frequently abused such targeting features, with results that range from violating civil rights laws…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
Recent trends reveal the search by companies for a legal hook to prevent the undesired and unauthorized copying of information posted on websites. In the center of this controversy are metasites, websites that display prices for a variety…
A randomized experiment with almost 35 million Pandora listeners enables us to measure the sensitivity of consumers to advertising, an important topic of study in the era of ad-supported digital content provision. The experiment randomized…
In the new digital age, information is available in large quantities. Since information consumes primarily the attention of its recipients, the scarcity of attention is becoming the main limiting factor. In this study, we investigate the…
Recommendation systems form the center piece of a rapidly growing trillion dollar online advertisement industry. Even with numerous optimizations and approximations, collaborative filtering (CF) based approaches require real-time…
Ads Content Safety at Google requires classifying billions of ads for Google Ads content policies. Consistent and accurate policy enforcement is important for advertiser experience and user safety and it is a challenging problem, so there…
Today, web-based companies use user data to provide and enhance services to users, both individually and collectively. Some also analyze user data for other purposes, for example to select advertisements or price offers for users. Some even…
Direct buy advertisers procure advertising inventory at fixed rates from publishers and ad networks. Such advertisers face the complex task of choosing ads amongst myriad new publisher sites. We offer evidence that advertisers do not excel…
This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…
Health information websites offer instantaneous access to information, but have important privacy implications as they can associate a visitor with specific medical conditions. We interviewed 35 residents of Canada to better understand…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
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…
Online advertisements have become one of today's most widely used tools for enhancing businesses partly because of their compatibility with A/B testing. A/B testing allows sellers to find effective advertisement strategies such as ad…
This paper explores the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity, and environmental impacts, specifically energy consumption and carbon emissions, in cloud-based office solutions. We hypothesise that solutions that emphasise privacy and…
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) secures the right to Opt-Out for consumers in California. However, websites may implement complex consent mechanisms that potentially do not capture the user's true choices. We investigated the…
In an effort to combat ad annoyance in mobile apps, publishers have introduced a new ad format called "Incentivized Advertising" or "Rewarded Advertising", whereby users receive rewards in exchange for watching ads. There is much debate in…
This article investigates privacy risks to those visiting health- related web pages. The population of pages analyzed is derived from the 50 top search results for 1,986 common diseases. This yielded a total population of 80,124 unique…