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The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…
On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to select Top N ads…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, the…
Privacy preference signals allow users to express preferences over how their personal data is processed. These signals become important in determining privacy outcomes when they reference an enforceable legal basis, as is the case with…
Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web advertising…
In this thesis we consider the problem of information hiding in the scenarios of interactive systems, statistical disclosure control, and refinement of specifications. We apply quantitative approaches to information flow in the first two…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
This paper tackles the challenging and practical problem of multi-identifier private user profile matching for privacy-preserving ad measurement, a cornerstone of modern advertising analytics. We introduce a comprehensive cryptographic…
Programmatic advertising operates one of the most sophisticated and efficient service platforms on the Internet. However, the complexity of this ecosystem is a direct cause of one of the most important problems in online advertising, the…
Mobile edge caching is a promising technology for the next-generation mobile networks to effectively offer service environment and cloud-storage capabilities at the edge of networks. By exploiting the storage and computing resources at the…
Despite having growing awareness and concerns about privacy, technology users are often insufficiently informed of the data practices of various digital products to protect themselves. Privacy policies and privacy labels, as two…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
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…
Web-based human trafficking activity has increased in recent years but it remains sparsely dispersed among escort advertisements and difficult to identify due to its often-latent nature. The use of intelligent systems to detect trafficking…
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…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
Online political advertising has grown significantly over the last few years. To monitor online sponsored political discourse, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have created public Ad Libraries collecting the political ads…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
The growth in the use of online advertising to foster brand awareness over recent years is largely attributable to the ubiquity of social media. One pivotal technology contributing to the success of online brand advertising is frequency…