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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…
Fake news is an age-old phenomenon, widely assumed to be associated with political propaganda published to sway public opinion. Yet, with the growth of social media, it has become a lucrative business for Web publishers. Despite many…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web advertising…
Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge…
Much information available on the web is copied, reused or rephrased. The phenomenon that multiple web sources pick up certain information is often called trend. A central problem in the context of web data mining is to detect those web…
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.…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
Over the past decade, advertising has emerged as the primary source of revenue for many web sites and apps. In this paper we report a first-of-its-kind study that seeks to broadly understand the features, mechanisms and dynamics of display…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
The PageRank algorithm employed at Google assigns a measure of importance to each web page for rankings in search results. In our recent papers, we have proposed a distributed randomized approach for this algorithm, where web pages are…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
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…
Funding the production of quality online content is a pressing problem for content producers. The most common funding method, online advertising, is rife with well-known performance and privacy harms, and an intractable subject-agent…
This research investigated how online criminal activities can be better understood and connected using data-driven machine learning methods. Many illegal activities, such as human trafficking and illicit trade, have moved to online…
One of the key emerging roles of the YouTube platform is providing creators the ability to generate revenue from their content and interactions. Alongside tools provided directly by the platform, such as revenue-sharing from advertising,…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
Recent industry reports assure the rise of web robots which comprise more than half of the total web traffic. They not only threaten the security, privacy and efficiency of the web but they also distort analytics and metrics, doubting the…
Social networks have become an essential meeting point for millions of individuals willing to publish and consume huge quantities of heterogeneous information. Some studies have shown that the data published in these platforms may contain…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…