Related papers: On the Robustness of Topics API to a Re-Identifica…
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…
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…
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…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
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…
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…
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…
Active re-identification attacks pose a serious threat to privacy-preserving social graph publication. Active attackers create fake accounts to build structural patterns in social graphs which can be used to re-identify legitimate users on…
AI-based face recognition, i.e., the re-identification of individuals within images, is an already well established technology for video surveillance, for user authentication, for tagging photos of friends, etc. This paper demonstrates that…
Privacy is of the utmost concern when it comes to releasing data to third parties. Data owners rely on anonymization approaches to safeguard the released datasets against re-identification attacks. However, even with strict anonymization in…
Open human mobility data is considered an essential basis for the profound research and analysis required for the transition to sustainable mobility and sustainable urban planning. Cycling data has especially been the focus of data…
Modern Web APIs allow developers to provide extensively customized experiences for website visitors, but the richness of the device information they provide also make them vulnerable to being abused to construct browser fingerprints,…
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…
Removing personally identifiable information (PII) from texts is necessary to comply with various data protection regulations and to enable data sharing without compromising privacy. However, recent works show that documents sanitized by…
To prove that a dataset is sufficiently anonymized, many privacy policies suggest that a re-identification risk assessment be performed, but do not provide a precise methodology for doing so, leaving the industry alone with the problem.…
Text de-identification techniques are often used to mask personally identifiable information (PII) from documents. Their ability to conceal the identity of the individuals mentioned in a text is, however, hard to measure. Recent work has…
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…
Our ability to control the flow of sensitive personal information to online systems is key to trust in personal privacy on the internet. We ask how to detect, assess and defend user privacy in the face of search engine personalisation? We…
With the success of Web applications, most of our data is now stored on various third-party servers where they are processed to deliver personalized services. Naturally we must be authenticated to access this personal information, but the…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…