Related papers: Wide-AdGraph: Detecting Ad Trackers with a Wide De…
This research investigated how online criminal activities can be better understood and connected using data-driven machine learning methods. Many illegal activities, such as human trafficking and illicit trade, have moved to online…
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…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
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…
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,…
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…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Sponsored search ads appear next to search results when people look for products and services on search engines. In recent years, they have become one of the most lucrative channels for marketing. As the fundamental basis of search ads,…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Today's Web services - such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook - leverage user data for varied purposes, including personalizing recommendations, targeting advertisements, and adjusting prices. At present, users have little insight into how…
Personalized advertisement is a crucial task for many of the online businesses and video broadcasters. Many of today's broadcasters use the same commercial for all customers, but as one can imagine different viewers have different interests…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
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…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
Online advertising is an important and huge industry. Having knowledge of the website attributes can contribute greatly to business strategies for ad-targeting, content display, inventory purchase or revenue prediction. Classical inferences…
We consider the problem of personalization of online services from the viewpoint of ad targeting, where we seek to find the best ad categories to be shown to each user, resulting in improved user experience and increased advertisers'…
Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition…
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…
Wildlife traffickers are increasingly carrying out their activities in cyberspace. As they advertise and sell wildlife products in online marketplaces, they leave digital traces of their activity. This creates a new opportunity: by…