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This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
"App stores" are online software stores where end users may browse, purchase, download, and install software applications. By far, the best known app stores are associated with mobile platforms, such as Google Play for Android and Apple's…
We turn our attention to the elephant in the room of data protection, which is none other than the simple and obvious question: "Who's tracking sensitive domains?". Despite a fast-growing amount of work on more complex facets of the…
With the emergence of deep learning techniques, smartphone apps are now embedded on-device AI features for enabling advanced tasks like speech translation, to attract users and increase market competitiveness. A good interaction design is…
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, forcing lockdowns and straining public health care systems. COVID-19 is known to be a highly infectious virus, and infected individuals do not initially exhibit symptoms,…
As mobile applications (apps) become ubiquitous in everyday life, it is crucial for developers to prioritize accessibility for users with diverse abilities. While previous research has identified widespread accessibility issues and raised…
This article evaluates the quality of data collection in individual-level desktop information tracking used in the social sciences and shows that the existing approaches face sampling issues, validity issues due to the lack of content-level…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
In real-world social networks, there is an increasing interest in tracking the evolution of groups of users and detecting the various changes they are liable to undergo. Several approaches have been proposed for this. In studying these…
Third-party tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is a significant and ubiquitous privacy threat in mobile apps. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to protect…
Failure to consider the characteristics, limitations, and abilities of diverse end-users during mobile apps development may lead to problems for end-users such as accessibility and usability issues. We refer to this class of problems as…
Mobile applications (apps) have become deeply personal, constantly demanding access to privacy-sensitive information in exchange for more personalized user experiences. Such privacy-invading practices have generated major multidimensional…
Millions of mobile apps have been available through various app markets. Although most app markets have enforced a number of automated or even manual mechanisms to vet each app before it is released to the market, thousands of low-quality…
Many accessibility features available on mobile platforms require applications (apps) to provide complete and accurate metadata describing user interface (UI) components. Unfortunately, many apps do not provide sufficient metadata for…
This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…
$\textbf{Context}$: The release planning of mobile apps has become an area of active research, with most studies centering on app analysis through release notes in the Apple App Store and tracking user reviews via issue trackers. However,…
In human-human conversations, Context Tracking deals with identifying important entities and keeping track of their properties and relationships. This is a challenging problem that encompasses several subtasks such as slot tagging,…
Android and Facebook provide third-party applications with access to users' private data and the ability to perform potentially sensitive operations (e.g., post to a user's wall or place phone calls). As a security measure, these platforms…
Dating apps for mobile devices, one popular GeoSocial app category, are growing increasingly popular. These apps encourage the sharing of more personal information than conventional social media apps, including continuous location data.…