Related papers: Understanding Quality of Experiences on Different …
Research on mobile phone use often starts with a question of "How much time users spend on using their phones?". The question involves an equal-length measure that captures the duration of mobile phone use but does not tackle the other…
Mobile applications (a.k.a., apps), which facilitate a large variety of tasks on mobile devices, have become indispensable in our everyday lives. Accomplishing a task may require the user to navigate among various apps. Unlike Web pages…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
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…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Context. Many Internet content platforms, such as Spotify and YouTube, provide their services via both native and Web apps. Even though those apps provide similar features to the end user, using their native version or Web counterpart might…
[Background] Web communication is universal in cyberspace, and security risks in this domain are devastating. [Aims] We analyzed the prevalence of six security smells in mobile app servers, and we investigated the consequence of these…
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,…
Over the past years, e-commerce platforms have expanded substantially, providing customers with convenient shopping experiences. To enhance e-commerce websites, it's essential to grasp user engagement and factors affecting conversion rates.…
Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information…
We feel happy when web-browsing operations provide us with necessary information; otherwise, we feel bitter. How to measure this happiness (or bitterness)? How does the profile of happiness grow and decay during the course of web-browsing?…
Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper…
Web cookies have been the subject of many research studies over the last few years. However, most existing research does not consider multiple crucial perspectives that can influence the cookie landscape, such as the client's location, the…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
The prevailing wisdom is that more network bandwidth does not matter much and that website performance is primarily limited by network latency. However, as mobile websites become more complex and mobile network performance improves, does…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
Numerous studies demonstrated that browser fingerprinting is detrimental to users' security and privacy. However, little is known about the effects of browser fingerprinting on Android hybrid apps -- where a stripped-down Chromium browser…
Energy efficiency is an important criterion to judge the quality of mobile apps, but one third of our randomly sampled apps suffer from energy issues that can quickly drain battery power. To understand these issues, we conducted an…
Due to the frequent encountering of web URLs in various application scenarios (e.g., chatting and email reading), many mobile apps build their in-app browsing interfaces (IABIs) to provide a seamless user experience. Although this achieves…
This technical report discusses three metrics of user engagement with online media. They are Commenting frequency, Voting frequency, and Voting balance. These relative figures can be derived from established, basic statistics available for…