Related papers: Understanding the Privacy Risks of Popular Search …
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…
How different are search engines? The search engine wars are a favorite topic of on-line analysts, as two of the biggest companies in the world, Google and Microsoft, battle for prevalence of the web search space. Differences in search…
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.,…
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…
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…
Third party advertising and tracking (A&T) are pervasive across the web, yet user exposure varies significantly with browser choice, browsing location, and hosting jurisdiction. We systematically study how these three factors shape tracking…
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…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
To what extent are users surveilled on the web, by what technologies, and by whom? We answer these questions by combining passively observed, anonymized browsing data of a large, representative sample of Americans with domain-level data on…
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…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
The fact that internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that…
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…
Data protection regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, require websites and embedded third-parties, especially advertisers, to seek user consent before they can collect and process user data. Only when the users opt in, can these entities…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
When it comes to search engines, users generally prefer Google. Our study aims to find the differences between the results found in Google compared to other search engines. We compared the top 10 results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…