Related papers: Investigating the effectiveness of web adblockers
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in adblocker use, driven by increased web tracking and personalized ads. However, a significant issue for adblocker users is the web breakages they encounter, which worsens their browsing experience and…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
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,…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Adblocking relies on filter lists, which are manually curated and maintained by a community of filter list authors. Filter list curation is a laborious process that does not scale well to a large number of sites or over time. In this paper,…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
A large share of all online display advertisements (ads) are never seen by a human. For instance, an ad could appear below the page fold, where a user never scrolls. Yet, an ad is essentially ineffective if it is not at least somewhat…
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…
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code and over one thousand JavaScript functions and properties available to website authors. This work investigates how these browser features are used on the modern,…
We analyze access statistics of a hundred and fifty blog entries and news articles, for periods of up to three years. Access rate falls as an inverse power of time passed since publication. The power law holds for periods of up to thousand…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Advertisements generate huge chunks of revenues for websites and online businesses. Ad-blocker and tracker blocking programs have gained momentum in the last few years with massive debates raging on privacy concerns and improving user…
With more than 500 million daily tweets from over 330 million active users, Twitter constantly attracts malicious users aiming to carry out phishing and malware-related attacks against its user base. It therefore becomes of paramount…
How effectively do we adhere to nudges and interventions that help us control our online browsing habits? If we have a temporary lapse and disable the behavior change system, do we later resume our adherence, or has the dam broken? In this…
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…