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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…
Since the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 more than 60 % of popular websites in Europe display cookie consent notices to their visitors. This has quickly led to users becoming fatigued with privacy…
Tor provides low-latency anonymous and uncensored network access against a local or network adversary. Due to the design choice to minimize traffic overhead (and increase the pool of potential users) Tor allows some information about the…
Cloaking has long been exploited by spammers for the purpose of increasing the exposure of their websites. In other words, cloaking has long served as a major malicious technique in search engine optimization (SEO). Cloaking hides the true…
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…
The steady reports of privacy invasions online paints a picture of the Internet growing into a more dangerous place. This is supported by reports of the potential scale for online harms facilitated by the mass deployment of online…
Online tracking is a primary concern for Internet users, yet previous research has not found a clear link between the cognitive understanding of tracking and protective actions. We postulate that protective behaviour follows affective…
Zoom serves millions of users daily and allows third-party developers to integrate their apps with the Zoom client and reach those users. So far, these apps' privacy and security aspects, which can access rich audio-visual data (among…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors of a website to access its content only after they make a choice between paying a fee or accept tracking. European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) recently issued guidelines and decisions on paywalls…
The domain name system (DNS) that maps alphabetic names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses plays a foundational role for Internet communications. By default, DNS queries and responses are exchanged in unencrypted plaintext, and…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Tag Management Systems were developed in order to support website publishers in installing multiple third-party JavaScript scripts (Tags) on their websites. Google developed its own TMS called ``Google Tag Manager'' (GTM) that is currently…
With the impending removal of third-party cookies from major browsers and the introduction of new privacy-preserving advertising APIs, the research community has a timely opportunity to assist industry in qualitatively improving the Web's…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
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…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies --…