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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…
Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust…
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
This paper introduces a Machine Learning-Driven website Platform and Browser Extension designed to quickly enhance online security by providing real-time risk scoring and fraud detection for website legitimacy verification and consumer…
In this digital era, our lives highly depend on the internet and worldwide technology. Wide usage of technology and platforms of communication makes our lives better and easier. But on the other side it carries out some security issues and…
Fingerprint recognition and matching is a common form of user authentication. While a fingerprint is unique to each individual, authentication is vulnerable when an attacker can forge a copy of the fingerprint (spoof). To combat these…
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…
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code and over one thousand JavaScript functions and properties available to website authors. This work investigates how these browser features are used on the modern,…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…
Digital fingerprinting is a framework for marking media files, such as images, music, or movies, with user-specific signatures to deter illegal distribution. Multiple users can collude to produce a forgery that can potentially overcome a…
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…
Tor is an anonymity network used by millions of people every day to evade censorship and protect their browsing activity from privacy threats such as mass surveillance. Unfortunately, Tor has been shown to be vulnerable to website…
With the rapid growth in smartphone usage, more organizations begin to focus on providing better services for mobile users. User identification can help these organizations to identify their customers and then cater services that have been…
VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using "dual…
With the increasing emphasis on how mobile technologies are experienced in everyday life, researchers are increasingly emphasizing the use of in-situ methods such as Experience Sampling and Day Reconstruction. In our line of research we…
We demonstrate how the multitude of sensors on a smartphone can be used to construct a reliable hardware fingerprint of the phone. Such a fingerprint can be used to de-anonymize mobile devices as they connect to web sites, and as a second…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
Cookie banners and privacy settings attempt to give users a sense of control over how their personal data is collected and used, but background tracking of personal information often continues unnoticed. To explore how such invisible data…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…