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Compliance with the European Union's Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation is challenging for online platforms, and assessing their compliance can be difficult for public authorities. This is partly due to the lack of automated tools for…
We perform a passive measurement study investigating how a Protective DNS service might perform in a Research & Education Network serving hundreds of member institutions. Utilizing freely-available DNS blocklists consisting of domain names…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of misinformation on the Internet, with online users constantly falling victims of fake news. A multitude of past studies have analyzed fake news diffusion mechanics and detection and…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
Online advertising represents a main instrument for publishers to fund content on the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, a significant number of online advertisements often accommodates potentially malicious content, such as cryptojacking…
With the impending removal of third-party cookies from major browsers and the introduction of new privacy-preserving advertising APIs, the research community has a timely opportunity to assist industry in qualitatively improving the Web's…
Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
The targeted direct-to-customer marketing of unapproved stem cell treatments by a questionable online industry is directed at vulnerable users who search the Internet in the hope of a cure. This behavior especially poses a threat to…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of…
Modern websites extensively rely on JavaScript to implement both functionality and tracking. Existing privacy enhancing content blocking tools struggle against mixed scripts, which simultaneously implement both functionality and tracking,…
Blocklisting is a common technique for preventing the use of known malicious content. However, conventional blocklisting infrastructures require either the blocklist to be public or clients to reveal their queries to the blocklist server.…
Free web proxies promise anonymity and censorship circumvention at no cost. Several websites publish lists of free proxies organized by country, anonymity level, and performance. These lists index hundreds of thousand of hosts discovered…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
Online advertising, as the vast market, has gained significant attention in various platforms ranging from search engines, third-party websites, social media, and mobile apps. The prosperity of online campaigns is a challenge in online…