Related papers: Whose Hands Are in the Finnish Cookie Jar?
Privacy has deteriorated in the world wide web ever since the 1990s. The tracking of browsing habits by different third-parties has been at the center of this deterioration. Web cookies and so-called web beacons have been the classical ways…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
User quality of experience in the context of Web browsing is being researched widely, with plenty of developments occurring alongside technological advances, not seldom driven by big industry players. With the huge reach and infrastructure…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
The study we carried out enabled us to extract some conclusions, which are contrasted with the results obtained. First, in the field of mobile applications, permissions and tracers are almost always present. Android, as far as PlayStore…
Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online…
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…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
We report from a study performed in ten European countries, where we asked about attitudes and behaviour towards data sharing behaviour. We looked into the differences between members of age groups. We find that there are more similarities…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Consider two brands that want to jointly test alternate web experiences for their customers with an A/B test. Such collaborative tests are today enabled using \textit{third-party cookies}, where each brand has information on the identity of…
How governments and Internet companies regulate user data on social media attracts public attention. This study tried to answer two questions: What kind of countries send more requests for Facebook user data? What kind of countries get more…
With the rapid increase in online interactions, concerns over data privacy and transparency of data processing practices have become more pronounced. While regulations like the GDPR have driven the widespread adoption of cookie banners in…
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…
There is a growing concern about consolidation trends in Internet services, with, for instance, a large fraction of popular websites depending on a handful of third-party service providers. In this paper, we report on a large-scale study 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…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Cookies are enjoyed best when they are both crispy and soft. I investigate in which proportion the cookies are crispy and soft, and disentangle whether it makes them biscuits, cakes, or none of the above. I baked cookies for colleagues at…