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HTTP client hints are a set of standardized HTTP request headers designed to modernize and potentially replace the traditional user agent string. While the user agent string exposes a wide range of information about the client's browser and…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…
Algorithm audits have increased in recent years due to a growing need to independently assess the performance of automatically curated services that process, filter, and rank the large and dynamic amount of information available on the…
Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they…
Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…
Web search is an integral part of our daily lives. Recently, there has been a trend of personalization in Web search, where different users receive different results for the same search query. The increasing level of personalization is…
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…
Advertisers are increasingly monitoring people's online behavior and using the information collected to show people individually targeted advertisements. This phenomenon is called online behavioral advertising (OBA). Although advertisers…
Recent advances in browser-based LLM agents have shown promise for automating tasks ranging from simple form filling to hotel booking or online shopping. Current benchmarks measure agent performance in controlled environments, such as…
YouTube has today become the primary news source for many users, which raises concerns about the role its recommendation algorithm can play in the spread of misinformation and political polarization. Prior work in this area has mainly…
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…
Online advertising is a huge, rapidly growing advertising market in today's world. One common form of online advertising is using image ads. A decision is made (often in real time) every time a user sees an ad, and the advertiser is eager…
Motivated by the growing popularity of smart TVs, we present a large-scale measurement study of smart TVs by collecting and analyzing their network traffic from two different vantage points. First, we analyze aggregate network traffic of…
Cookie banners, the pop ups that appear to collect your consent for data collection, are a tempting ground for dark patterns. Dark patterns are design elements that are used to influence the user's choice towards an option that is not in…
Today's largest technology corporations, especially ones with consumer-facing products such as social media platforms, use a variety of unethical and often outright illegal tactics to maintain their dominance. One tactic that has risen to…
This study examines the influence of Google's search algorithm on news diversity by analyzing search results in Brazil, the UK, and the US. It explores how Google's system preferentially favors a limited number of news outlets. Utilizing…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
The investigation of the browsing behavior of users provides useful information to optimize web site design, web browser design, search engines offerings, and online advertisement. This has been a topic of active research since the Web…
Web agents have shown great promise in performing many tasks on ecommerce website. To assess their capabilities, several benchmarks have been introduced. However, current benchmarks in the e-commerce domain face two major problems. First,…
Mobile web browsing has recently surpassed desktop browsing both in term of popularity and traffic. Following its desktop counterpart, the mobile browsers ecosystem has been growing from few browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) to a…