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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…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
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…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
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…
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…
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…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
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…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
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…
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…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
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…
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…
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…
Tracking pixels are used to optimize online ad campaigns through personalization, re-targeting, and conversion tracking. Past research has primarily focused on detecting the prevalence of tracking pixels on the web, with limited attention…
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…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…