Related papers: Whose Hands Are in the Finnish Cookie Jar?
Public sector is a large consumer of ICT systems and services, used for various public services. Tendering for such systems is governed by laws aimed at eliminating unfair advantages and offering all possible parties equal opportunities to…
HTTP client hints are a set of standardized HTTP request headers designed to modernize and potentially replace the traditional user agent string. While the user agent string exposes a wide range of information about the client's browser and…
While there is increasing global attention to data privacy, most of their current theoretical understanding is based on research conducted in a few countries. Prior work argues that people's cultural backgrounds might shape their privacy…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
Internet becomes a large and rich repository of information about us as individually. Any thing form user profile information to friends links the user subscribes to are reflection of social interactions as user has in real worlds. Social…
Web applications often include third-party content and scripts to personalize a user's online experience. These scripts have unrestricted access to a user's private data stored in the browser's persistent storage like cookies, localstorage…
Online Social Networking Sites attracted a massive number of users over the past decade but also raised privacy concerns with the amount of personal information disclosed. Studies have shown that 25% of the users are not aware of privacy…
The steady reports of privacy invasions online paints a picture of the Internet growing into a more dangerous place. This is supported by reports of the potential scale for online harms facilitated by the mass deployment of online…
With the increasing concerns around privacy and the enforcement of data privacy laws, many websites now provide users with privacy controls. However, locating these controls can be challenging, as they are frequently hidden within multiple…
Fairness monitoring is critical for detecting algorithmic bias, as mandated by the EU AI Act. Since such monitoring requires sensitive user data (e.g., ethnicity), the AI Act permits its processing only with strict privacy measures, such as…
The Internet and social media have transformed news availability and accessibility, reshaping information consumption and production. However, they can also facilitate the rapid spread of misinformation, posing significant societal…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
There is an increasing supply and demand for political advertising throughout the world. At the same time, societal threats, such as election interference by foreign governments and other bad actors, continues to be a pressing concern in…
Facebook uses Artificial Intelligence for targeting users with advertisements based on the events in which they engage like sharing, liking, making comments, posts by a friend, a group creation, etcetera. Each user interacts with these…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies --…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
The age of technology has created a huge market for smartphones and Apps usage and a new generation has been created based on knowledge sharing. Now knowledge has been made easily accessible by Apps but; are users even aware of the…