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Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with…
Web tracking through third-party cookies is considered a threat to users' privacy and is supposed to be abandoned in the near future. Recently, Google proposed the Topics API framework as a privacy-friendly alternative for behavioural…
The blockchain technology empowers secure, trustless, and privacy-preserving trading with cryptocurrencies. However, existing blockchain-based trading platforms only support trading cryptocurrencies with digital assets (e.g., NFTs).…
In the past years, many proposals have emerged in order to address online advertising use-cases without access to third-party cookies. All these proposals leverage some privacy-enhancing technologies such as aggregation or differential…
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly capable of initiating financial transactions on behalf of users or other agents. This evolution introduces a fundamental challenge: verifying both the authenticity of an autonomous agent…
Location-Based Services (LBSs) provide valuable services, with convenient features for mobile users. However, the location and other information disclosed through each query to the LBS erodes user privacy. This is a concern especially…
Autonomous multimodal language models are rapidly evolving into web agents that can browse, click, and purchase items on behalf of users, posing a threat to display advertising designed for human eyes. Yet little is known about how these…
There has been an unprecedented surge in the number of service providers offering a wide range of machine learning prediction APIs for tasks such as image classification, language translation, etc. thereby monetizing the underlying data and…
Recently, cybersecurity becomes more and more important due to the rapid development of Internet. However, existing methods are in reality highly sensitive to attacks and are far more vulnerable than expected, as they are lack of trustable…
This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
The rapid advancement of ML models in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and security has intensified the need for robust data security, model integrity, and reliable outputs. Large multimodal foundational models, while crucial…
Blockchain technology has been envisaged to commence an era of decentralised applications and services (DApps) without the need for a trusted intermediary. Such DApps open a marketplace in which services are delivered to end-users by…
In the era of data-driven economies, incentive systems and loyalty programs, have become ubiquitous in various sectors, including advertising, retail, travel, and financial services. While these systems offer advantages for both users and…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
Online trackers personalize ads campaigns, exponentially increasing their efficacy compared to traditional channels. The downside of this is that thousands of mostly unknown systems own our profiles and violate our privacy without our…
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…
We argue that governments should mandate a three-tier anonymity framework on social-media platforms as a reactionary measure prompted by the ease-of-production of deepfakes and large-language-model-driven misinformation. The tiers are…
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…
On-device deep learning (DL) has rapidly gained adoption in mobile apps, offering the benefits of offline model inference and user privacy preservation over cloud-based approaches. However, it inevitably stores models on user devices,…