Related papers: Missed by Filter Lists: Detecting Unknown Third-Pa…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
Browser fingerprinting often provides an attractive alternative to third-party cookies for tracking users across the web. In fact, the increasing restrictions on third-party cookies placed by common web browsers and recent regulations like…
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to…
Web tracking technologies are pervasive and operated by a few large technology companies. This technology, and the use of the collected data has been implicated in influencing elections, fake news, discrimination, and even health decisions.…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Ad and tracking blocking extensions are popular tools for improving web performance, privacy and aesthetics. Content blocking extensions typically rely on filter lists to decide whether a web request is associated with tracking or…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
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…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
Browser fingerprinting is a stateless tracking technique that attempts to combine information exposed by multiple different web APIs to create a unique identifier for tracking users across the web. Over the last decade, trackers have abused…
Phishing continues to pose a significant cybersecurity threat. While blocklists currently serve as a primary defense, due to their reactive, passive nature, these delayed responses leave phishing websites operational long enough to harm…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We…
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…
Trackers have recently started to mix tracking and functional resources to circumvent privacy-enhancing content blocking tools. Such mixed web resources put content blockers in a bind: risk breaking legitimate functionality if they act and…
The World Wide Web's connectivity is greatly attributed to the HTTP protocol, with HTTP messages offering informative header fields that appeal to disciplines like web security and privacy, especially concerning web tracking. Despite…
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…
A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…
Email tracking allows email senders to collect fine-grained behavior and location data on email recipients, who are uniquely identifiable via their email address. Such tracking invades user privacy in that email tracking techniques gather…