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Advertisements (ads) are an innate part of search engine business models. Advertisers are willing to pay search engines to promote their content to a prominent position in the search result page (SERP). This raises concerns about the search…
Extensions provide useful additional functionality for web browsers, but are also an increasingly popular vector for attacks. Due to the high degree of privilege extensions can hold, extensions have been abused to inject advertisements into…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
Integrating Google's Topics API into the digital advertising ecosystem represents a significant shift toward privacy-conscious advertising practices. This article analyses the implications of implementing Topics API on ad networks, focusing…
This paper explores the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity, and environmental impacts, specifically energy consumption and carbon emissions, in cloud-based office solutions. We hypothesise that solutions that emphasise privacy and…
Online advertising fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although users can access most of the web services free of charge, they pay a heavy coston their privacy. They are forced to trust third parties and intermediaries, who not…
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…
In display advertising, users' online ad experiences are important for the advertising effectiveness. However, users have not been well accommodated in real-time bidding (RTB). This further influences their site visits and perception of the…
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…
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,…
Organic updates (from a member's network) and sponsored updates (or ads, from advertisers) together form the newsfeed on LinkedIn. The newsfeed, the default homepage for members, attracts them to engage, brings them value and helps LinkedIn…
Web browsing is the main Internet Service and every customer wants the minimum web page loading times. To satisfy this perpetual need, web browsers offer new processing engines and increased functionalities. Web developers make use of new…
Web page categorization is one of the challenging tasks in the world of ever increasing web technologies. There are many ways of categorization of web pages based on different approach and features. This paper proposes a new dimension in…
Ranking systems in web search and recommendation allocate attention among items and providers, and therefore need to balance relevance-based effectiveness with provider fairness. Existing fair-ranking methods commonly focus on exposure…
Privacy has deteriorated in the world wide web ever since the 1990s. The tracking of browsing habits by different third-parties has been at the center of this deterioration. Web cookies and so-called web beacons have been the classical ways…
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…
Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from…
The browser history reveals highly sensitive information about users, such as financial status, health conditions, or political views. Private browsing modes and anonymity networks are consequently important tools to preserve the privacy…
E-commerce platforms usually present an ordered list, mixed with several organic items and an advertisement, in response to each user's page view request. This list, the outcome of ad auction and allocation processes, directly impacts the…
Being able to check whether an online advertisement has been targeted is essential for resolving privacy controversies and implementing in practice data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA. In this paper we describe the…