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This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
Web tracking harms user privacy. As a result, the use of tracker detection and blocking tools is a common practice among Internet users. However, no such tool can be perfect, and thus there is a trade-off between avoiding breakage (caused…
Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition…
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…
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 domain name system (DNS) is a crucial backbone of the Internet and millions of new domains are created on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these domains are legitimate, adversaries also register new hostnames to carry out…
Various in-browser privacy protection techniques have been designed to protect end-users from third-party tracking. In an arms race against these counter-measures, the tracking providers developed a new technique called CNAME cloaking based…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
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…
Throughout recent years, the importance of internet-privacy has continuously risen. [...] Browser fingerprinting is a technique that does not require cookies or persistent identifiers. It derives a sufficiently unique identifier from the…
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…
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…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
Recent developments in online tracking make it harder for individuals to detect and block trackers. Some sites have deployed indirect tracking methods, which attempt to uniquely identify a device by asking the browser to perform a…
Carousels (also-known as multilists) have become the standard user interface for e-commerce platforms replacing the ranked list, the previous standard for recommender systems. While the research community has begun to focus on carousels,…
We turn our attention to the elephant in the room of data protection, which is none other than the simple and obvious question: "Who's tracking sensitive domains?". Despite a fast-growing amount of work on more complex facets of the…
Under increasing scrutiny, many web companies now offer bespoke mechanisms allowing any third party to file complaints (e.g., requesting the de-listing of a URL from a search engine). While this self-regulation might be a valuable web…
In this paper we present a platform which is usable by novice users without domain knowledge of experts. The platform consisting of an iOS app to monitor network traffic and a website to evaluate the results. Monitoring takes place…
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…
Recent advances in web technologies make it more difficult than ever to detect and block web tracking systems. In this work, we propose ASTrack, a novel approach to web tracking detection and removal. ASTrack uses an abstraction of the code…