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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…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
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…
Malware spread among websites and between websites and clients is an increasing problem. Search engines play an important role in directing users to websites and are a natural control point for intervening, using mechanisms such as…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
This paper introduces adF, a novel system for analyzing the vulnerability of different devices, Operating Systems (OSes), and browsers to web fingerprinting. adF performs its measurements from code inserted in ads. We have used our system…
Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad…
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…
In order to evaluate the prevalence of security and privacy practices on a representative sample of the Web, researchers rely on website popularity rankings such as the Alexa list. While the validity and representativeness of these rankings…
Website accessibility is essential for inclusiveness and regulatory compliance. Although third-party advertisements (ads) are a vital revenue source for free web services, they introduce significant accessibility challenges. Leasing a…
Content blocking is an important part of a performant, user-serving, privacy respecting web. Most content blockers build trust labels over URLs. While useful, this approach has well understood shortcomings. Attackers may avoid detection by…
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Active Internet measurement studies rely on a list of targets to be scanned. While probing the entire IPv4 address space is feasible for scans of limited complexity, more complex scans do not scale to measuring the full Internet. Thus, a…
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…
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,…
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of topics,…