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The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) secures the right to Opt-Out for consumers in California. However, websites may implement complex consent mechanisms that potentially do not capture the user's true choices. We investigated 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…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
Companies that have an online presence-in particular, companies that are exclusively digital-often subscribe to this business model: collect data from the user base, then expose the data to advertisement agencies in order to turn a profit.…
Web applications often include third-party content and scripts to personalize a user's online experience. These scripts have unrestricted access to a user's private data stored in the browser's persistent storage like cookies, localstorage…
In this paper we argue that policies are an increasing concern for organizations that are operating a web site. Examples of policies that are relevant in the domain of the web address issues such as privacy of personal data, accessibility…
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 intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
The web is global, but privacy laws differ by country. Which set of privacy rules do websites follow? We empirically study this question by detecting and analyzing cookie notices in an automated way. We crawl 1,500 European, American, and…
In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites to…
Cookie banners are devices implemented by websites to allow users to manage their privacy settings with respect to the use of cookies. They are part of a user's daily web browsing experience since legislation in Europe requires websites to…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
This PhD thesis discusses how European law could improve privacy protection in the area of behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting, also referred to as online profiling, involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the…
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…
India is experiencing intense political partisanship and sectarian divisions. The paper performs, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive analysis on the Indian online news media with respect to tracking and partisanship. We…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
The web is used daily by billions. Even so, users are not protected from many threats by default. This position paper builds on previous web privacy and security research and introduces JShelter, a webextension that fights to return the…