Related papers: Can Common Crawl reliably track persistent identif…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Collections of Web documents about specific topics are needed for many areas of current research. Focused crawling enables the creation of such collections on demand. Current focused crawlers require the user to manually specify starting…
Frequent pattern mining is a key area of study that gives insights into the structure and dynamics of evolving networks, such as social or road networks. However, not only does a network evolve, but often the way that it evolves, itself…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally…
Web tracking through third-party cookies is considered a threat to users' privacy and is supposed to be abandoned in the near future. Recently, Google proposed the Topics API framework as a privacy-friendly alternative for behavioural…
Journalistic fact-checking, as well as social or economic research, require analyzing high-quality statistics datasets (SDs, in short). However, retrieving SD corpora at scale may be hard, inefficient, or impossible, depending on how they…
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…
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers.…
We examine the properties of all HTTP requests generated by a thousand undergraduates over a span of two months. Preserving user identity in the data set allows us to discover novel properties of Web traffic that directly affect models of…
Recently the problem of indexing and locating content in peer-to-peer networks has received much attention. Previous work suggests caching index entries at intermediate nodes that lie on the paths taken by search queries, but until now…
Online network crawling tasks require a lot of efforts for the researchers to collect the data. One of them is identification of important nodes, which has many applications starting from viral marketing to the prevention of disease spread.…
The number of computers, tablets and smartphones is increasing rapidly, which entails the ownership and use of multiple devices to perform online tasks. As people move across devices to complete these tasks, their identities becomes…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
The problem of unicity and reidentifiability of records in large-scale databases has been studied in different contexts and approaches, with focus on preserving privacy or matching records from different data sources. With an increasing…
Person re-identification (ReID) is now an active research topic for AI-based video surveillance applications such as specific person search, but the practical issue that the target person(s) may change clothes (clothes inconsistency…
Commercial web search engines employ near-duplicate detection to ensure that users see each relevant result only once, albeit the underlying web crawls typically include (near-)duplicates of many web pages. We revisit the risks and…
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…
Crawling parallel texts -- texts that are mutual translations -- from the Internet is usually done following a brute-force approach: documents are massively downloaded in an unguided process, and only a fraction of them end up leading to…
This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
Web caches play a crucial role in web performance and scalability. However, detecting cached responses is challenging when web servers do not reliably communicate the cache status through standardized headers. This paper presents a novel…