Related papers: Whose Hands Are in the Finnish Cookie Jar?
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
The research community has deemed cookie synchronization detection an inherently challenging task. Studies aiming to identify cookie synchronizations often share high-level design choices, but deviate amongst low-level implementations. For…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
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…
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…
During the past few years, mostly as a result of the GDPR and the CCPA, websites have started to present users with cookie consent banners. These banners are web forms where the users can state their preference and declare which cookies…
As third-party cookies are being phased out or restricted by major browsers, first-party cookies are increasingly repurposed for tracking. Prior work has shown that third-party scripts embedded in the main frame can access and exfiltrate…
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…
In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites to…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors of a website to access its content only after they make a choice between paying a fee or accept tracking. European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) recently issued guidelines and decisions on paywalls…
As a result of the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, European users encounter cookie banners on almost every website. Many of such banners are implemented by Consent Management Providers (CMPs), who respect the IAB Europe's Transparency and…
Since the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 more than 60 % of popular websites in Europe display cookie consent notices to their visitors. This has quickly led to users becoming fatigued with privacy…
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…
How did we get from a world where cookies were something you ate and where "non-techies" were unaware of "Netscape cookies" to a world where cookies are a hot-button privacy issue for many computer users? This paper will describe how HTTP…
Open access WiFi hotspots are widely deployed in many public places, including restaurants, parks, coffee shops, shopping malls, trains, airports, hotels, and libraries. While these hotspots provide an attractive option to stay connected,…
In this work, we analyze the legal requirements on how cookie banners are supposed to be implemented to be fully compliant with the e-Privacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation. Our contribution resides in the definition…
On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…
The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the…
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…
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…