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Data is the new oil; this refrain is repeated extensively in the age of internet tracking, machine learning, and data analytics. Social network analysis, cookie-based advertising, and government surveillance are all evidence of the use of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-08-11 Jeffrey Pawlick , Quanyan Zhu

Algorithms engineered to leverage rich behavioral and biometric data to predict individual attributes and actions continue to permeate public and private life. A fundamental risk may emerge from misconceptions about the sensitivity of such…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Jeremy Gordon , Max Curran , John Chuang , Coye Cheshire

Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks, which covertly monitor user communications to identify the web pages they visit, pose a serious threat to user privacy. Existing WF defenses attempt to reduce attack accuracy by disrupting traffic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Siyuan Liang , Jiajun Gong , Tianmeng Fang , Aishan Liu , Tao Wang , Xiaochun Cao , Dacheng Tao , Ee-Chien Chang

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…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2020-01-20 Maurizio Aiello , Enrico Cambiaso , Roberto Canonico , Leonardo Maccari , Marco Mellia , Antonio Pescapè , Ivan Vaccari

We consider the problem of obfuscating sensitive information while preserving utility, and we propose a machine learning approach inspired by the generative adversarial networks paradigm. The idea is to set up two nets: the generator, that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Marco Romanelli , Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis , Catuscia Palamidessi

Dataset obfuscation refers to techniques in which random noise is added to the entries of a given dataset, prior to its public release, to protect against leakage of private information. In this work, dataset obfuscation under two…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Mahshad Shariatnasab , Farhad Shirani , S. Sitharma Iyengar

High-performance visual recognition systems generally require a large collection of labeled images to train. The expensive data curation can be an obstacle for improving recognition performance. Sharing more data allows training for better…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Tae-hoon Kim , Dongmin Kang , Kari Pulli , Jonghyun Choi

Advertisers are increasingly monitoring people's online behavior and using the information collected to show people individually targeted advertisements. This phenomenon is called online behavioral advertising (OBA). Although advertisers…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Sophie C. Boerman , Sanne Kruikemeier , Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius

Crowdsourced data used in machine learning services might carry sensitive information about attributes that users do not want to share. Various methods have been proposed to minimize the potential information leakage of sensitive attributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Han Zhao , Jianfeng Chi , Yuan Tian , Geoffrey J. Gordon

Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Xi Chen , Ali Ghadirzadeh , Tianhe Yu , Yuan Gao , Jianhao Wang , Wenzhe Li , Bin Liang , Chelsea Finn , Chongjie Zhang

Training against white-box deception detectors has been proposed as a way to make AI systems honest. However, such training risks models learning to obfuscate their deception to evade the detector. Prior work has studied obfuscation only in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Mohammad Taufeeque , Stefan Heimersheim , Adam Gleave , Chris Cundy

The goal of homomorphic encryption is to encrypt data such that another party can operate on it without being explicitly exposed to the content of the original data. We introduce an idea for a privacy-preserving transformation on natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Zhifeng Hu , Serhii Havrylov , Ivan Titov , Shay B. Cohen

Concerns for the privacy of individuals captured in public imagery have led to privacy-preserving action recognition. Existing approaches often suffer from issues arising through obfuscation being applied globally and a lack of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Filip Ilic , He Zhao , Thomas Pock , Richard P. Wildes

The policy represented by the deep neural network can overfit the spurious features in observations, which hamper a reinforcement learning agent from learning effective policy. This issue becomes severe in high-dimensional state, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

This paper proposes an algorithm that aims to improve generalization for reinforcement learning agents by removing overfitting to confounding features. Our approach consists of a max-min game theoretic objective. A generator transfers the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Digital advertising platforms operate millisecond-level auctions through Real-Time Bidding (RTB) systems, where advertisers compete for ad impressions through algorithmic bids. This dynamic mechanism enables precise audience targeting but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Pusen Dong , Chenglong Cao , Xinyu Zhou , Jirong You , Linhe Xu , Feifan Xu , Shuo Yuan

Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Joseph J. Pfeiffer , Denis Charles , Davis Gilton , Young Hun Jung , Mehul Parsana , Erik Anderson

Recently, privacy issues in web services that rely on users' personal data have raised great attention. Unlike existing privacy-preserving technologies such as federated learning and differential privacy, we explore another way to mitigate…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Ziqian Chen , Fei Sun , Yifan Tang , Haokun Chen , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding

Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Sandra Siby , Umar Iqbal , Steven Englehardt , Zubair Shafiq , Carmela Troncoso

As more and more personal photos are shared online, being able to obfuscate identities in such photos is becoming a necessity for privacy protection. People have largely resorted to blacking out or blurring head regions, but they result in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-19 Qianru Sun , Liqian Ma , Seong Joon Oh , Luc Van Gool , Bernt Schiele , Mario Fritz