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Recommendations are central to the utility of many websites including YouTube, Quora as well as popular e-commerce stores. Such sites typically contain a set of recommendations on every product page that enables visitors to easily navigate…
Ranking algorithms are the information gatekeepers of the Internet era. We develop a stylized model to study the effects of ranking algorithms on opinion dynamics. We consider a search engine that uses an algorithm based on popularity and…
Botnets represent a global problem and are responsible for causing large financial and operational damage to their victims. They are implemented with evasion in mind, and aim at hiding their architecture and authors, making them difficult…
The opaqueness of modern digital advertising, exemplified by platforms such as Meta Ads, raises concerns regarding their autonomous control over audience targeting, pricing structures, and ad relevancy assessments. Locked in their leading…
Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or…
Influence maximization is the problem of finding influential users, or nodes, in a graph so as to maximize the spread of information. It has many applications in advertising and marketing on social networks. In this paper, we study a highly…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
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 --…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
Finding groups of connected individuals in large graphs with tens of thousands or more nodes has received considerable attention in academic research. In this paper, we analyze three main issues with respect to the recent influx of papers…
The Topics API for the web is Google's privacy-enhancing alternative to replace third-party cookies. Results of prior work have led to an ongoing discussion between Google and research communities about the capability of Topics to trade off…
Graph centrality measures use the structure of a network to quantify central or "important" nodes, with applications in web search, social media analysis, and graphical data mining generally. Traditional centrality measures such as the well…
We consider the problem of identifying coordinated influence campaigns conducted by automated agents or bots in a social network. We study several different Twitter datasets which contain such campaigns and find that the bots exhibit…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Personalization is pervasive in the online space as, when combined with learning, it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that such…
This work has as the principal theme, the study, analysis and implementation of the methodology for use the web sites in e-commerce. The authors try to deal with particular methodological and applied aspects inherent in the analysis of data…
The connectivity of the Internet at the Autonomous System level is influenced by the network operator policies implemented. These in turn impose a direction to the announcement of address advertisements and, consequently, to the paths that…
Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among several accounts and these automated campaigns can manipulate…
Being able to check whether an online advertisement has been targeted is essential for resolving privacy controversies and implementing in practice data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA. In this paper we describe the…