Related papers: Tracing Information Flows Between Ad Exchanges Usi…
Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
Autonomous multimodal language models are rapidly evolving into web agents that can browse, click, and purchase items on behalf of users, posing a threat to display advertising designed for human eyes. Yet little is known about how these…
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…
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…
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…
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…
From many datasets gathered in online social networks, well defined community structures have been observed. A large number of users participate in these networks and the size of the resulting graphs poses computational challenges. There is…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
In this work, we model the end-to-end pipeline of the advertising ecosystem, allowing us to identify two main issues with the current trajectory of private advertising proposals. First, prior work has largely considered ad targeting and…
Revelations of large scale electronic surveillance and data mining by governments and corporations have fueled increased adoption of HTTPS. We present a traffic analysis attack against over 6000 webpages spanning the HTTPS deployments of 10…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
Ad exchanges are becoming an increasingly popular way to sell advertisement slots on the internet. An ad exchange is basically a spot market for ad impressions. A publisher who has already signed contracts reserving advertisement…
Ad exchanges are kind of the most popular online advertising marketplaces for trading ad spaces over the Internet. Ad exchanges run auctions to sell diverse ad spaces on the publishers' web-pages to advertisers, who want to display ads on…
The Internet facilitates sex trafficking through adult service websites (ASWs) that host online advertisements for sexual services (sex ads). Since the closure of the popular site Backpage.com, the ecosystem of ASWs has expanded to include…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons:…
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.…