Related papers: CookieEnforcer: Automated Cookie Notice Analysis a…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and…
Consider two brands that want to jointly test alternate web experiences for their customers with an A/B test. Such collaborative tests are today enabled using \textit{third-party cookies}, where each brand has information on the identity of…
Third-party tracking is common on almost all commercially operated websites. Prior work has studied in detail the extent of third-party tracking on the web, detection of third-party trackers, and defending against third-party tracking.…
Recommender systems take inputs from user history, use an internal ranking algorithm to generate results and possibly optimize this ranking based on feedback. However, often the recommender system is unaware of the actual intent of the user…
Cookie banners and privacy settings attempt to give users a sense of control over how their personal data is collected and used, but background tracking of personal information often continues unnoticed. To explore how such invisible data…
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…
Several studies have shown that the network traffic that is generated by a visit to a website over Tor reveals information specific to the website through the timing and sizes of network packets. By capturing traffic traces between users…
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…
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…
Online advertisers and analytics services (or trackers), are constantly tracking users activities as they access web services either through browsers or a mobile apps. Numerous tools such as browser plugins and specialized mobile apps have…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
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…
Timing attacks have been a continuous threat to users' privacy in modern browsers. To mitigate such attacks, existing approaches, such as Tor Browser and Fermata, add jitters to the browser clock so that an attacker cannot accurately…
The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content. We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to…
This paper addresses the question whether the recently proposed approach of concise privacy notices in apps and on websites is effective in raising user awareness. To assess the effectiveness in a realistic setting, we included concise…
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…
Extensions provide useful additional functionality for web browsers, but are also an increasingly popular vector for attacks. Due to the high degree of privilege extensions can hold, extensions have been abused to inject advertisements into…