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Tracking pixels are used to optimize online ad campaigns through personalization, re-targeting, and conversion tracking. Past research has primarily focused on detecting the prevalence of tracking pixels on the web, with limited attention…
Information systems experience an ever-growing volume of unstructured data, particularly in the form of textual materials. This represents a rich source of information from which one can create value for people, organizations and…
Privacy preference signals are digital representations of how users want their personal data to be processed. Such signals must be adopted by both the sender (users) and intended recipients (data processors). Adoption represents a…
The Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, provides a de facto standard for requesting, recording, and managing user consent from European end-users. This framework has…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
Browser fingerprinting enables persistent cross-site user tracking via subtle techniques that often evade conventional defenses or cause website breakage when script-level blocking countermeasures are applied. Addressing these challenges…
Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
We evaluate the impact of probabilistically-constructed digital identity data collected from Sep. to Dec. 2017 (approx.), in the context of Lookalike-targeted campaigns. The backbone of this study is a large set of…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
Understanding latent user needs beneath shopping behaviors is critical to e-commercial applications. Without a proper definition of user needs in e-commerce, most industry solutions are not driven directly by user needs at current stage,…
Knockoffs are a popular statistical framework that addresses the challenging problem of conditional variable selection in high-dimensional settings with statistical control. Such statistical control is essential for the reliability of…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
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…
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…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
In response to growing concerns about user privacy, legislators have introduced new regulations and laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that force websites to obtain user…
With the rapid growth in smartphone usage, more organizations begin to focus on providing better services for mobile users. User identification can help these organizations to identify their customers and then cater services that have been…
Users' search tasks have become increasingly complicated, requiring multiple queries and interactions with the results. Recent studies have demonstrated that modeling the historical user behaviors in a session can help understand the…
Social media users generate tremendous amounts of data. To better serve users, it is required to share the user-related data among researchers, advertisers and application developers. Publishing such data would raise more concerns on user…