Related papers: Tracing Information Flows Between Ad Exchanges Usi…
Data sent over the Internet can be monitored and manipulated by intermediate entities in the data path from the source to the destination. For unencrypted communications (and some encrypted communications with known weaknesses),…
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…
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…
Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on…
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…
Digital advertising is the most popular way for content monetization on the Internet. Publishers spawn new websites, and older ones change hands with the sole purpose of monetizing user traffic. In this ever-evolving ecosystem, it is…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
Commercial organisations are holding and processing an ever-increasing amount of personal data. Policies and laws are continually changing to require these companies to be more transparent regarding the collection, storage, processing and…
Modern society depends on the flow of information over online social networks, and users of popular platforms generate significant behavioral data about themselves and their social ties. However, it remains unclear what fundamental limits…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…
How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect information diffusion in online social networks, including: the novelty of information, users' activity levels,…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
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…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
The growing use of social media has led to drastic changes in our decision-making. Especially, Facebook offers marketing API which promotes business to target potential groups who are likely to consume their items. However, this service can…
High-latency anonymous communication systems prevent passive eavesdroppers from inferring communicating partners with certainty. However, disclosure attacks allow an adversary to recover users' behavioral profiles when communications are…
Ad exchanges, i.e., platforms where real-time auctions for ad impressions take place, have developed sophisticated technology and data ecosystems to allow advertisers to target users, yet advertisers may not know which sites their ads…
Advertising becomes one of the most popular ways of monetizing an online transaction platform. Usually, sponsored advertisements are posted on the most attractive positions to enhance the number of clicks. However, multiple e-commerce…
User behaviour targeting is essential in online advertising. Compared with sponsored search keyword targeting and contextual advertising page content targeting, user behaviour targeting builds users' interest profiles via tracking their…
Caching content at the edge network is a popular and effective technique widely deployed to alleviate the burden of network backhaul, shorten service delay and improve service quality. However, there has been some controversy over privacy…