Related papers: Who's Tracking Sensitive Domains?
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
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…
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…
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…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
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…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is central to all Internet user activity, resolving accessed domain names into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. As a result, curious DNS resolvers can learn everything about Internet users' interests. Public…
Under increasing scrutiny, many web companies now offer bespoke mechanisms allowing any third party to file complaints (e.g., requesting the de-listing of a URL from a search engine). While this self-regulation might be a valuable web…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
Third party tracking is the practice by which third parties recognize users accross different websites as they browse the web. Recent studies show that 90% of websites contain third party content that is tracking its users across the web.…
Domain lists are a key ingredient for representative censuses of the Web. Unfortunately, such censuses typically lack a view on domains under country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs). This introduces unwanted bias: many countries have a rich…
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…
In recent years, the amount of information collected about human beings has increased dramatically. This development has been partially driven by individuals posting and storing data about themselves and friends using online social networks…
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…
The domain name system (DNS) is a crucial backbone of the Internet and millions of new domains are created on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these domains are legitimate, adversaries also register new hostnames to carry out…
Software logs, generated during the runtime of software systems, are essential for various development and analysis activities, such as anomaly detection and failure diagnosis. However, the presence of sensitive information in these logs…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
As our lives migrate to the digital realm, our online identity has evolved to become an increasingly robust collection of data about every aspect of our online and offline lives. This data is extremely appealing to companies who wish to use…