Related papers: Review of Cookie Synchronization Detection Methods
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
In this work, we analyze the legal requirements on how cookie banners are supposed to be implemented to be fully compliant with the e-Privacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation. Our contribution resides in the definition…
The number of computers, tablets and smartphones is increasing rapidly, which entails the ownership and use of multiple devices to perform online tasks. As people move across devices to complete these tasks, their identities becomes…
Stateful and stateless web tracking gathered much attention in the last decade, however they were always measured separately. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to detect and measure cookie respawning with browser and…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers.…
As third-party cookie blocking is becoming the norm in browsers, advertisers and trackers have started to use first-party cookies for tracking. We conduct a differential measurement study on 10K websites with third-party cookies allowed and…
Online privacy has become increasingly important in recent years. While third-party cookies have been widely used for years, they have also been criticized for their potential impact on user privacy. They can be used by advertisers to track…
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…
Online services provide users with cookie banners to accept/reject the cookies placed on their web browsers. Despite the increased adoption of cookie banners, little has been done to ensure that cookie consent is compliant with privacy laws…
This paper investigates the accessibility of cookie notices on websites for users with visual impairments (VI) via a set of system studies on top UK websites (n=46) and a user study (n=100). We use a set of methods and tools--including…
Web cookies are ubiquitously used to track and profile the behavior of users. Although there is a solid empirical foundation for understanding the use of cookies in the global world wide web, thus far, limited attention has been devoted for…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
Online websites use cookie notices to elicit consent from the users, as required by recent privacy regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA. Prior work has shown that these notices use dark patterns to manipulate users into making…
Characterizing the community structure of complex networks is a key challenge in many scientific fields. Very diverse algorithms and methods have been proposed to this end, many working reasonably well in specific situations. However, no…
Cookie banners, the pop ups that appear to collect your consent for data collection, are a tempting ground for dark patterns. Dark patterns are design elements that are used to influence the user's choice towards an option that is not in…
Browser fingerprinting often provides an attractive alternative to third-party cookies for tracking users across the web. In fact, the increasing restrictions on third-party cookies placed by common web browsers and recent regulations like…
The enforcement of the GDPR led to the widespread adoption of consent notices, colloquially known as cookie banners. Studies have shown that many website operators do not comply with the law and track users prior to any interaction with the…
Discovering community structure in complex networks is a mature field since a tremendous number of community detection methods have been introduced in the literature. Nevertheless, it is still very challenging for practioners to determine…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…