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While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…

We present a systematic study of ad blocking - and the associated "arms race" - as a security problem. We model ad blocking as a state space with four states and six state transitions, which correspond to techniques that can be deployed by…

Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to…

We investigate adblocking filters and the extent to which websites and advertisers react when their content is impacted by these filters. We collected data daily from the Alexa Top-5000 web sites for 120 days, and from specific sites that…

The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…

Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…

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…

Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…

To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…

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,…

Cookie banners are devices implemented by websites to allow users to manage their privacy settings with respect to the use of cookies. They are part of a user's daily web browsing experience since legislation in Europe requires websites to…

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…

To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores…

Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…

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…

Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…

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,…

Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…

Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…

Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…