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With the rise of Web 2.0 platforms such as online social media, people's private information, such as their location, occupation and even family information, is often inadvertently disclosed through online discussions. Therefore, it is…
In E-commerce advertising, where product recommendations and product ads are presented to users simultaneously, the traditional setting is to display ads at fixed positions. However, under such a setting, the advertising system loses the…
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…
This paper uses and recycles data from a third-party digital marketing firm, to explore how targeted ads contribute to larger systems of racial discrimination. Focusing on a case study of targeted ads for educational searches in New York…
The primary objective of an anonymity tool is to protect the anonymity of its users through the implementation of strong encryption and obfuscation techniques. As a result, it becomes very difficult to monitor and identify users activities…
Many tracking companies collect user data and sell it to data markets and advertisers. While they claim to protect user privacy by anonymizing the data, our research reveals that significant privacy risks persist even with anonymized data.…
Sponsored search represents a major source of revenue for web search engines. This popular advertising model brings a unique possibility for advertisers to target users' immediate intent communicated through a search query, usually by…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…
We increasingly live in a data-driven world, with diverse kinds of data distributed across many locations. In some cases, the datasets are collected from multiple locations, such as sensors (e.g., mobile phones and street cameras) spread…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…
In today's world, the presence of online disinformation and propaganda is more widespread than ever. Independent publishers are funded mostly via digital advertising, which is unfortunately also the case for those publishing disinformation…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
The success of generative AI relies heavily on training on data scraped through extensive crawling of the Internet, a practice that has raised significant copyright, privacy, and ethical concerns. While few measures are designed to resist a…
Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose Harpo, a…
Graphs are a widely used data structure for collecting and analyzing relational data. However, when the graph structure is distributed across several parties, its analysis is particularly challenging. In particular, due to the sensitivity…
Modern websites extensively rely on JavaScript to implement both functionality and tracking. Existing privacy enhancing content blocking tools struggle against mixed scripts, which simultaneously implement both functionality and tracking,…
Major advertising platforms recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers' access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally…
When surfing the Internet, individuals leak personal and corporate information to third parties whose (legitimate or not) businesses revolve around the value of collected data. The implications are serious, from a person unwillingly…