Related papers: Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking …
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
Over the past years, advertisement companies have used various tracking methods to persistently track users across the web. Such tracking methods usually include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, as well as a variety of…
Revelations of large scale electronic surveillance and data mining by governments and corporations have fueled increased adoption of HTTPS. We present a traffic analysis attack against over 6000 webpages spanning the HTTPS deployments of 10…
We identify class of covert channels in browsers that are not mitigated by current defenses, which we call "pool-party" attacks. Pool-party attacks allow sites to create covert channels by manipulating limited-but-unpartitioned resource…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
Despite stringent data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other country-specific regulations, many websites continue to use cookies to track user…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…
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…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
With the success of Web applications, most of our data is now stored on various third-party servers where they are processed to deliver personalized services. Naturally we must be authenticated to access this personal information, but the…
Web cookies are ubiquitously used to track and profile the behavior of users. Although there is a solid empirical foundation for understanding the use of cookies in the global world wide web, thus far, limited attention has been devoted for…
India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
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…
Web cookies have been the subject of many research studies over the last few years. However, most existing research does not consider multiple crucial perspectives that can influence the cookie landscape, such as the client's location, the…
Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…