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A consumer-dependent (business-to-consumer) organization tends to present itself as possessing a set of human qualities, which is termed as the brand personality of the company. The perception is impressed upon the consumer through the…
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…
As an important type of cloud data, digital provenance is arousing increasing attention on improving system performance. Currently, provenance has been employed to provide cues regarding access control and to estimate data quality. However,…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Online websites use cookie notices to elicit consent from the users, as required by recent privacy regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA. Prior work has shown that these notices use dark patterns to manipulate users into making…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Provenance systems are used to capture history metadata, applications include ownership attribution and determining the quality of a particular data set. Provenance systems are also used for debugging, process improvement, understanding…
Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling…
As graph data becomes more ubiquitous, the need for robust inferential graph algorithms to operate in these complex data domains is crucial. In many cases of interest, inference is further complicated by the presence of adversarial data…
The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content. We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to…
The enforcement of the GDPR led to the widespread adoption of consent notices, colloquially known as cookie banners. Studies have shown that many website operators do not comply with the law and track users prior to any interaction with the…
In recent years, Cyber attacks have increased in number, and with them, the intensity of the attacks and their potential to damage the user have also increased significantly. In an ever-advancing world, users find it difficult to keep up…
Host-based threats such as Program Attack, Malware Implantation, and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), are commonly adopted by modern attackers. Recent studies propose leveraging the rich contextual information in data provenance to detect…
In the standard web browser programming model, third-party scripts included in an application execute with the same privilege as the application's own code. This leaves the application's confidential data vulnerable to theft and leakage by…
In today's world, the presence of online disinformation and propaganda is more widespread than ever. Independent publishers are funded mostly via digital advertising, which is unfortunately also the case for those publishing disinformation…
Data provenance has numerous applications in the context of data preparation pipelines. It can be used for debugging faulty pipelines, interpreting results, verifying fairness, and identifying data quality issues, which may affect the…
This paper performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web, to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they did not directly load. Although the majority (84.91%) of websites have short dependency chains…
In the last decade, the advertisement market spread significantly in the web and mobile app system. Its effectiveness is also due thanks to the possibility to target the advertisement on the specific interests of the actual user, other than…
What if a successful company starts to receive a torrent of low-valued (one or two stars) recommendations in its mobile apps from multiple users within a short (say one month) period of time? Is it legitimate evidence that the apps have…
Debugging distributed systems in-production is inevitable and hard. Myriad interactions between concurrent components in modern, complex and large-scale systems cause non-deterministic bugs that offline testing and verification fail to…