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Over the past decade, Internet centralization and its implications for both people and the resilience of the Internet has become a topic of active debate. While the networking community informally agrees on the definition of centralization,…
Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
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…
Over the past years, e-commerce platforms have expanded substantially, providing customers with convenient shopping experiences. To enhance e-commerce websites, it's essential to grasp user engagement and factors affecting conversion rates.…
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…
This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
Understanding how people interact with the web is key for a variety of applications, e.g., from the design of effective web pages to the definition of successful online marketing campaigns. Browsing behavior has been traditionally…
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…
Third-party cookies have been a privacy concern since cookies were first developed in the mid 1990s, but more strict cookie policies were only introduced by Internet browser vendors in the early 2010s. More recently, due to regulatory…
We show how third-party web trackers can deanonymize users of cryptocurrencies. We present two distinct but complementary attacks. On most shopping websites, third party trackers receive information about user purchases for purposes of…
Getting deeper insights into the online browsing behavior of Web users has been a major research topic since the advent of the WWW. It provides useful information to optimize website design, Web browser design, search engines offerings, and…
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…
Cross-browser compatibility testing is concerned with identifying perceptible differences in the way a Web page is rendered across different browsers or configurations thereof. Existing automated cross-browser compatibility testing methods…
In order to evaluate the prevalence of security and privacy practices on a representative sample of the Web, researchers rely on website popularity rankings such as the Alexa list. While the validity and representativeness of these rankings…
Online advertisements have become one of today's most widely used tools for enhancing businesses partly because of their compatibility with A/B testing. A/B testing allows sellers to find effective advertisement strategies such as ad…
Search engines decide what we see for a given search query. Since many people are exposed to information through search engines, it is fair to expect that search engines are neutral. However, search engine results do not necessarily cover…
PageRank is a ranking of the web pages that measures how often a given web page is visited by a random surfer on the web graph, for a simple model of web surfing. It seems realistic that PageRank may also have an influence on the behavior…
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018. Its privacy regulations apply to any service and company collecting or processing personal data in Europe. Many companies had to adjust their…