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The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the performative power of online search providers. Instantiated…
Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
Third-party tracking allows companies to collect users' behavioural data and track their activity across digital devices. This can put deep insights into users' private lives into the hands of strangers, and often happens without users'…
The widespread sharing of consumers personal information with third parties raises significant privacy concerns. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates that online businesses offer consumers the option to opt out of the sale…
Vagueness and ambiguity in privacy policies threaten the ability of consumers to make informed choices about how businesses collect, use, and share their personal information. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018 was intended…
Web forms are one of the primary ways to collect personal information online, yet they are relatively under-studied. Unlike web tracking, data collection through web forms is explicit and contextualized. Users (i) are asked to input…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
System-generated user-facing notices, dialogs, and warnings in privacy and security interventions present the opportunity to support users in making informed decisions about identified risks. However, too often, they are bypassed, ignored,…
Online advertisements that masquerade as non-advertising content pose numerous risks to users. Such hidden advertisements appear on social media platforms when content creators or "influencers" endorse products and brands in their content.…
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 status-quo of misinformation moderation is a central authority, usually social platforms, deciding what content constitutes misinformation and how it should be handled. However, to preserve users' autonomy, researchers have explored…
Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose Harpo, a…
Recommender system is an essential component of web services to engage users. Popular recommender systems model user preferences and item properties using a large amount of crowdsourced user-item interaction data, e.g., rating scores; then…
This paper introduces a Machine Learning-Driven website Platform and Browser Extension designed to quickly enhance online security by providing real-time risk scoring and fraud detection for website legitimacy verification and consumer…
Many tracking companies collect user data and sell it to data markets and advertisers. While they claim to protect user privacy by anonymizing the data, our research reveals that significant privacy risks persist even with anonymized data.…
Most users agree to online privacy policies without reading or understanding them, even though these documents govern how personal data is collected, shared, and monetized. Privacy policies are typically long, legally complex, and difficult…
Throughout recent years, the importance of internet-privacy has continuously risen. [...] Browser fingerprinting is a technique that does not require cookies or persistent identifiers. It derives a sufficiently unique identifier from the…
Email tracking allows email senders to collect fine-grained behavior and location data on email recipients, who are uniquely identifiable via their email address. Such tracking invades user privacy in that email tracking techniques gather…
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…