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Whistleblower laws protect individuals who inform the public or an authority about governmental or corporate misconduct. Despite these laws, whistleblowers frequently risk reprisals and sites such as WikiLeaks emerged to provide a level of…
Advertising is a primary means for revenue generation for millions of websites and smartphone apps (publishers). Naturally, a fraction of publishers abuse the ad-network to systematically defraud advertisers of their money. Defenses have…
The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-blocking software, such as new ad-blocking and privacy-oriented browsers or browser extensions. In response, both ad publishers and ad networks are constantly trying to…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Web Usage Mining is an application of Data Mining Techniques to discover interesting usage patterns from web data in order to understand and better serve the needs of web-based applications. The paper proposes an algorithm for finding these…
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…
Finding dense bipartite subgraphs and detecting the relations among them is an important problem for affiliation networks that arise in a range of domains, such as social network analysis, word-document clustering, the science of science,…
Recent advances in web technologies make it more difficult than ever to detect and block web tracking systems. In this work, we propose ASTrack, a novel approach to web tracking detection and removal. ASTrack uses an abstraction of the code…
Browser fingerprinting often provides an attractive alternative to third-party cookies for tracking users across the web. In fact, the increasing restrictions on third-party cookies placed by common web browsers and recent regulations like…
Tracking pixels are used to optimize online ad campaigns through personalization, re-targeting, and conversion tracking. Past research has primarily focused on detecting the prevalence of tracking pixels on the web, with limited attention…
Conflicts of interest often arise between data sources and their users regarding how the users' information needs should be interpreted by the data source. For example, an online product search might be biased towards presenting certain…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
Nowadays, many web databases "hidden" behind their restrictive search interfaces (e.g., Amazon, eBay) contain rich and valuable information that is of significant interests to various third parties. Recent studies have demonstrated the…
An average adult is exposed to hundreds of digital advertisements daily (https://www.mediadynamicsinc.com/uploads/files/PR092214-Note-only-150-Ads-2mk.pdf), making the digital advertisement industry a classic example of a big-data-driven…
Modern Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) present complex layouts where multiple elements compete for visibility. Attention modelling is crucial for optimising web design and computational advertising, whereas attention metrics can inform…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
Densest subgraph detection is a fundamental graph mining problem, with a large number of applications. There has been a lot of work on efficient algorithms for finding the densest subgraph in massive networks. However, in many domains, the…
Web tracking is a pervasive and opaque practice that enables personalized advertising, retargeting, and conversion tracking. Over time, it has evolved into a sophisticated and invasive ecosystem, employing increasingly complex techniques to…
How can we detect suspicious users in large online networks? Online popularity of a user or product (via follows, page-likes, etc.) can be monetized on the premise of higher ad click-through rates or increased sales. Web services and social…
To combat fake news, researchers mostly focused on detecting fake news and journalists built and maintained fact-checking sites (e.g., Snopes.com and Politifact.com). However, fake news dissemination has been greatly promoted via social…