Related papers: Exploring the Cookieverse: A Multi-Perspective Ana…
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…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
Cookie banners are devices implemented by websites to allow users to manage their privacy settings with respect to the use of cookies. They are part of a user's daily web browsing experience since legislation in Europe requires websites to…
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…
In response to the ePrivacy Directive and the consent requirements introduced by the GDPR, websites began deploying consent banners to obtain user permission for data collection and processing. However, due to shared third-party services…
A cookie banner pops up when a user visits a website for the first time, requesting consent to the use of cookies and other trackers for a variety of purposes. Unlike prior work that has focused on evaluating the user interface (UI) design…
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…
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…
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…
As a result of the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, European users encounter cookie banners on almost every website. Many of such banners are implemented by Consent Management Providers (CMPs), who respect the IAB Europe's Transparency and…
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…
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…
The main goal of this paper is to study how often cookie banners that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contain aesthetic manipulation, a design tactic to draw users' attention to the button that permits personal…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…