Related papers: Towards Understanding First-Party Cookie Tracking …
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Browsers and their users can be tracked even in the absence of a persistent IP address or cookie. Unique and hence identifying pieces of information, making up what is known as a fingerprint, can be collected from browsers by a visited…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Most search engines can potentially infer the preferences and interests of a user based on her history of search queries. While search engines can use these inferences for a variety of tasks, including targeted advertisements, such tasks do…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
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…
Automated analysis of privacy policies has proved a fruitful research direction, with developments such as automated policy summarization, question answering systems, and compliance detection. Prior research has been limited to analysis of…
Third-party cookies have been a privacy concern since cookies were first developed in the mid 1990s, but more strict cookie policies were only introduced by Internet browser vendors in the early 2010s. More recently, due to regulatory…
Data collection and aggregation by online services happens to an extent that is often beyond awareness and comprehension of its users. Transparency tools become crucial to inform people, though it is unclear how well they work. To…
The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers' Web browsing data without their consent.…
HTTP client hints are a set of standardized HTTP request headers designed to modernize and potentially replace the traditional user agent string. While the user agent string exposes a wide range of information about the client's browser and…
How did we get from a world where cookies were something you ate and where "non-techies" were unaware of "Netscape cookies" to a world where cookies are a hot-button privacy issue for many computer users? This paper will describe how HTTP…
Information about millions of people is collected for behavioural targeting, a type of marketing that involves tracking people's online behaviour for targeted advertising. It is hotly debated whether data protection law applies to…
With mobile phone penetration rates reaching 90%, Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) can offer extremely valuable information to different sectors, including policymakers. Indeed, as part of CPNI, Call Detail Records have been…
Most websites offer their content for free, though this gratuity often comes with a counterpart: personal data is collected to finance these websites by resorting, mostly, to tracking and thus targeted advertising. Cookie walls and…
Cybersquatting refers to the practice where attackers register a domain name similar to a legitimate one to confuse users for illegal gains. With the growth of the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem, there are indications that…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
The enforcement of the GDPR led to the widespread adoption of consent notices, colloquially known as cookie banners. Studies have shown that many website operators do not comply with the law and track users prior to any interaction with the…
The growth in the use of online advertising to foster brand awareness over recent years is largely attributable to the ubiquity of social media. One pivotal technology contributing to the success of online brand advertising is frequency…
The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this…