Related papers: Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynam…
Autonomous agents increasingly interact with the web, yet most websites remain designed for human browsers -- a fundamental mismatch that the emerging ``Agentic Web'' must resolve. Agents must repeatedly browse pages, inspect DOMs, and…
Increased data gathering capacity, together with the spread of data analytics techniques, has prompted an unprecedented concentration of information related to the individuals' preferences in the hands of a few gatekeepers. In the present…
The widespread use of Smart Home devices has attracted significant research interest in understanding their behavior within home networks. Unlike general-purpose computers, these devices exhibit relatively simple and predictable network…
While much current web privacy research focuses on browser fingerprinting, the boring fact is that the majority of current third-party web tracking is conducted using traditional, persistent-state identifiers. One possible explanation for…
Third-party applications have become an essential part of today's online ecosystem, enhancing the functionality of popular platforms. However, the intensive data exchange underlying their proliferation has increased concerns about…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Secondary use of growing real-world data (RWD) in education offers significant opportunities for research, yet privacy practices intended to enable third-party access to such RWD are rarely evaluated for their implications for downstream…
We turn our attention to the elephant in the room of data protection, which is none other than the simple and obvious question: "Who's tracking sensitive domains?". Despite a fast-growing amount of work on more complex facets of the…
ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have already…
The Web today has millions of datasets, and the number of datasets continues to grow at a rapid pace. These datasets are not standalone entities; rather, they are intricately connected through complex relationships. Semantic relationships…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological…
"Data" is becoming an indispensable production factor, just like land, infrastructure, labor or capital. As part of this, a myriad of applications in different sectors require huge amounts of information to feed models and algorithms…
India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We…
Website accessibility is essential for inclusiveness and regulatory compliance. Although third-party advertisements (ads) are a vital revenue source for free web services, they introduce significant accessibility challenges. Leasing a…
Web cookies have been the subject of many research studies over the last few years. However, most existing research does not consider multiple crucial perspectives that can influence the cookie landscape, such as the client's location, the…
Web forms are one of the primary ways to collect personal information online, yet they are relatively under-studied. Unlike web tracking, data collection through web forms is explicit and contextualized. Users (i) are asked to input…
In the current Internet, there is no clean way for affected parties to react to poor forwarding performance: when a domain violates its Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a contractual partner, the partner must resort to ad-hoc…