Related papers: Beyond content analysis: Detecting targeted ads vi…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue…
Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinated efforts. These campaigns contribute to the shaping of…
Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
In online advertising, our aim is to match the advertisers with the most relevant users to optimize the campaign performance. In the pursuit of achieving this goal, multiple data sources provided by the advertisers or third-party data…
Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, can these entities…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
We describe Quizz, a gamified crowdsourcing system that simultaneously assesses the knowledge of users and acquires new knowledge from them. Quizz operates by asking users to complete short quizzes on specific topics; as a user answers the…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…
Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically creating and…
In Internet of Things (IoT) driven smart-world systems, real-time crowd-sourced databases from multiple distributed servers can be aggregated to extract dynamic statistics from a larger population, thus providing more reliable knowledge for…
Since most countries are coming up with online privacy regulations, such as GDPR in the EU, online publishers need to find a balance between revenue from targeted advertisement and user privacy. One way to be able to still show targeted…
Many researchers and organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, have raised awareness of the dangers of advertisements targeted at children. While most existing laws only regulate ads on television that may reach children, lawmakers have been…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
State-of-the-art methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate crowd density. While effective, deep learning approaches are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which, in a crowd-counting context, can lead to…
Online advertising relies on trackers and data brokers to show targeted ads to users. To improve targeting, different entities in the intricately interwoven online advertising and tracking ecosystems are incentivized to share information…
The growth in the use of online advertising to foster brand awareness over recent years is largely attributable to the ubiquity of social media. One pivotal technology contributing to the success of online brand advertising is frequency…
Over the past decade, advertising has emerged as the primary source of revenue for many web sites and apps. In this paper we report a first-of-its-kind study that seeks to broadly understand the features, mechanisms and dynamics of display…