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Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Motivated by Internet advertising applications, online allocation problems have been studied extensively in various adversarial and stochastic models. While the adversarial arrival models are too pessimistic, many of the stochastic (such as…
The success of generative AI relies heavily on training on data scraped through extensive crawling of the Internet, a practice that has raised significant copyright, privacy, and ethical concerns. While few measures are designed to resist a…
Web applications often include third-party content and scripts to personalize a user's online experience. These scripts have unrestricted access to a user's private data stored in the browser's persistent storage like cookies, localstorage…
Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws…
Algorithm audits are powerful tools for studying black-box systems. While very effective in examining technical components, the method stops short of a sociotechnical frame, which would also consider users as an integral and dynamic part of…
Various methods have been proposed for creating and maintaining lists of potentially filtered URLs to allow for measurement of ongoing internet censorship around the world. Whilst testing a known resource for evidence of filtering can be…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relying on web crawling to stay up to date and accurately answer user queries. These crawlers are expected to honor robots.txt files, which govern automated access. In this study, for the first…
Auditing differential privacy has emerged as an important area of research that supports the design of privacy-preserving mechanisms. Privacy audits help to obtain empirical estimates of the privacy parameter, to expose flawed…
Modern applications increasingly interact with web APIs -- reusable components, deployed and operated outside the application, and accessed over the network. Their existence, arguably, spurs application innovations, making it easy to…
The presence of third-party tracking on websites has become customary. However, our understanding of the third-party ecosystem is still very rudimentary. We examine third-party trackers from a geographical perspective, observing the…
In many online platforms, customers' decisions are substantially influenced by product rankings as most customers only examine a few top-ranked products. Concurrently, such platforms also use the same data corresponding to customers'…
The number of public and private web archives has increased, and we implicitly trust content delivered by these archives. Fixity is checked to ensure an archived resource has remained unaltered since the time it was captured. Some web…
Privacy has been a major concern for everybody over the internet. Governments across the globe have given their views on how the internet space can be managed effectively so that there is some control on the flow of confidential information…
Automated analysis of privacy policies has proved a fruitful research direction, with developments such as automated policy summarization, question answering systems, and compliance detection. Prior research has been limited to analysis of…
Studies have shown that the traces people leave when browsing the internet may indicate the onset of diseases such as cancer. Here we show that the adaptive engines of advertising systems in conjunction with clinically verified…
The Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocol is by now more than a decade old. During this time, a handful of measurement papers have looked at bidding strategies, personal information flow, and cost of display advertising through RTB. In this…
The Tor anonymity network is difficult to measure because, if not done carefully, measurements could risk the privacy (and potentially the safety) of the network's users. Recent work has proposed the use of differential privacy and secure…
An average adult is exposed to hundreds of digital advertisements daily (https://www.mediadynamicsinc.com/uploads/files/PR092214-Note-only-150-Ads-2mk.pdf), making the digital advertisement industry a classic example of a big-data-driven…