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Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
As e-commerce continues to expand, the urgency for stronger privacy and security measures becomes increasingly critical, particularly on platforms frequented by younger users who are often less aware of potential risks. In our analysis of…
In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites 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.…
Front-end web code has become a core product surface for every frontier LLM release, yet evaluating these interactive applications at development speed remains costly because human-judged leaderboards like Arena do not scale. Existing…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
With the rapid increase in online interactions, concerns over data privacy and transparency of data processing practices have become more pronounced. While regulations like the GDPR have driven the widespread adoption of cookie banners in…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
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…
The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Advertising, long the financial mainstay of the web ecosystem, has become nearly ubiquitous in the world of mobile apps. While ad targeting on the web is fairly well understood, mobile ad targeting is much less studied. In this paper, we…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Cookies maintain state across related web traffic. As such, cookies are commonly used for authentication by storing a user's session ID and replacing the need to re-enter credentials in subsequent traffic. These so-called ``session…
Autonomous multimodal language models are rapidly evolving into web agents that can browse, click, and purchase items on behalf of users, posing a threat to display advertising designed for human eyes. Yet little is known about how these…
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…
In todays world, the internet affects every aspect of human life; it has caused changes in corporate websites as well as in many other areas. Corporate websites should be more dynamic, more interactive, and more compatible with new…
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires websites to ask for consent to the use of cookies for \emph{specific purposes}. This enlarges the relevant design space for consent dialogs. Websites could try to…