Related papers: A Quantitative Information Flow Analysis of the 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…
Privacy has been a major concern for everybody over the internet. Governments across the globe have given their views on how the internet space can be managed effectively so that there is some control on the flow of confidential information…
We evaluate the impact of probabilistically-constructed digital identity data collected from Sep. to Dec. 2017 (approx.), in the context of Lookalike-targeted campaigns. The backbone of this study is a large set of…
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…
Most companies' new business practices are based on customer data. These practices have raised privacy concerns because of the associated risks. Privacy laws require companies to gain customer consent before using their information, which…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
With the impending removal of third-party cookies from major browsers and the introduction of new privacy-preserving advertising APIs, the research community has a timely opportunity to assist industry in qualitatively improving the Web's…
The privacy implications of third-party tracking is a well-studied problem. Recent research has shown that besides data aggregators and behavioral advertisers, online social networks also act as trackers via social widgets. Existing cookie…
In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using the theory of contextual integrity (CI) to annotate and evaluate privacy policy statements. We perform a case study using CI annotations to compare Facebook's privacy policy before…
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…
The Privacy Sandbox initiative from Google includes APIs for enabling privacy-preserving advertising functionalities as part of the effort around limiting third-party cookies. In particular, the Private Aggregation API (PAA) and the…
The Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is a series of proposals from Google to reduce ``cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all''. Over the years, Google implemented, experimented,…
Collecting personally identifiable information (PII) on data subjects has become big business. Data brokers and data processors are part of a multi-billion-dollar industry that profits from collecting, buying, and selling consumer data. Yet…
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…
Black-box machine learning models are being used in more and more high-stakes domains, which creates a growing need for Explainable AI (XAI). Unfortunately, the use of XAI in machine learning introduces new privacy risks, which currently…
The recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed individuals to rely on automated systems for a variety of reasons. Some of these systems are the currently popular voice-enabled systems like Echo by Amazon and Home by…
The proliferation of AI agents, with their complex and context-dependent actions, renders conventional privacy paradigms obsolete. This position paper argues that the current model of privacy management, rooted in a user's unilateral…
Quantitative Information Flow (QIF) provides a robust information-theoretical framework for designing secure systems with minimal information leakage. While previous research has addressed the design of such systems under hard constraints…
We present a systematic refactoring of the conventional treatment of privacy analyses, basing it on mathematical concepts from the framework of Quantitative Information Flow (QIF). The approach we suggest brings three principal advantages:…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…