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With the success of Web applications, most of our data is now stored on various third-party servers where they are processed to deliver personalized services. Naturally we must be authenticated to access this personal information, but the…
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…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
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…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
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…
Over the past years, advertisement companies have used various tracking methods to persistently track users across the web. Such tracking methods usually include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, as well as a variety of…
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 response to growing concerns about user privacy, legislators have introduced new regulations and laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that force websites to obtain user…
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…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Stateful and stateless web tracking gathered much attention in the last decade, however they were always measured separately. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to detect and measure cookie respawning with browser and…
Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws…
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…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
Recent privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have established legal requirements for obtaining user consent regarding the collection, use, and sharing of…
Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, can these entities…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Online privacy has become increasingly important in recent years. While third-party cookies have been widely used for years, they have also been criticized for their potential impact on user privacy. They can be used by advertisers to track…