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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…
Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
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…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
Programmatic advertising operates one of the most sophisticated and efficient service platforms on the Internet. However, the complexity of this ecosystem is a direct cause of one of the most important problems in online advertising, the…
Online advertising is a cornerstone of the Internet ecosystem, with advertising measurement playing a crucial role in optimizing efficiency. Ad measurement entails attributing desired behaviors, such as purchases, to ad exposures across…
The targeted advertising is based on preference profiles inferred via relationships among individuals, their monitored responses to previous advertising and temporal activity over the Internet, which has raised critical privacy concerns. In…
The financial sector's adoption of technology-driven data analysis has enhanced operational efficiency and revenue generation by leveraging personal sensitive data. However, the inherent characteristics of blockchain hinder decentralized…
The analysis of the privacy properties of Privacy-Preserving Ads APIs is an area of research that has received strong interest from academics, industry, and regulators. Despite this interest, the empirical study of these methods is hindered…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
While online interactions and exchanges have grown exponentially over the past decade, most commercial infrastructures still operate through centralized protocols, and their success essentially depends on trust between different economic…
Employee data can be used to facilitate work, but their misusage may pose risks for individuals. Inverse transparency therefore aims to track all usages of personal data, allowing individuals to monitor them to ensure accountability for…
Thanks to the widespread deployment of TLS, users can access private data over channels with end-to-end confidentiality and integrity. What they cannot do, however, is prove to third parties the {\em provenance} of such data, i.e., that it…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
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.…
Reviews and ratings by users form a central component in several widely used products today (e.g., product reviews, ratings of online content, etc.), but today's platforms for managing such reviews are ad-hoc and vulnerable to various forms…
The Topics API for the web is Google's privacy-enhancing alternative to replace third-party cookies. Results of prior work have led to an ongoing discussion between Google and research communities about the capability of Topics to trade off…
The recent trend of self-sovereign Decentralized AI Agents (DeAgents) combines Large Language Model (LLM)-based AI agents with decentralization technologies such as blockchain smart contracts and trusted execution environments (TEEs). These…