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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…
Web tracking through third-party cookies is considered a threat to users' privacy and is supposed to be abandoned in the near future. Recently, Google proposed the Topics API framework as a privacy-friendly alternative for behavioural…
The Topics API for the web is Google's privacy-enhancing alternative to replace third-party cookies. Results of prior work have led to an ongoing discussion between Google and research communities about the capability of Topics to trade off…
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…
The analysis of the privacy properties of Privacy-Preserving Ads APIs is an area of research that has received strong interest from academics, industry, and regulators. Despite this interest, the empirical study of these methods is hindered…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Compact user representations (such as embeddings) form the backbone of personalization services. In this work, we present a new theoretical framework to measure re-identification risk in such user representations. Our framework, based on…
In 2020, Google announced it would disable third-party cookies in the Chrome browser to improve user privacy. In order to continue to enable interest-based advertising while mitigating risks of individualized user tracking, Google proposed…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
Integrating Google's Topics API into the digital advertising ecosystem represents a significant shift toward privacy-conscious advertising practices. This article analyses the implications of implementing Topics API on ad networks, focusing…
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…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
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…
The privacy of an individual is bounded by the ability of a third party to reveal their identity. Certain data items such as a passport ID or a mobile phone number may be used to uniquely identify a person. These are referred to as Personal…
Major advertising platforms recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers' access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Search engines have vast technical capabilities to retain Internet search logs for each user and thus present major privacy vulnerabilities to both individuals and organizations in revealing user intent. Additionally, many of the web search…
This paper tackles the challenging and practical problem of multi-identifier private user profile matching for privacy-preserving ad measurement, a cornerstone of modern advertising analytics. We introduce a comprehensive cryptographic…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…