Related papers: A Public and Reproducible Assessment of the Topics…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Google AI Overviews (AIOs) are arguably the most widely encountered deployment of generative AI, reaching over 2 billion users who may not realize the answers they see are AI-generated. Where search engines have traditionally surfaced…
With social media datasets being increasingly shared by researchers, it also presents the caveat that those datasets are not always completely replicable. Having to adhere to requirements of platforms like Twitter, researchers cannot…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
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…
The possibility of fingerprinting the search keywords issued by a user on popular web search engines is a significant threat to user privacy. This threat has received surprisingly little attention in the network traffic analysis literature.…
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,…
YouTube is among the most widely-used platforms worldwide, and has seen a lot of recent academic attention. Despite its popularity and the number of studies conducted on it, much less is understood about the way in which YouTube's Data API,…
As millions of people use ChatGPT for tasks such as education, writing assistance, and health advice, concerns have grown about how personal prompts and data are stored and used. This study explores how Reddit users collectively negotiate…
Context: As mobile applications (Apps) widely spread over our society and life, various personal information is constantly demanded by Apps in exchange for more intelligent and customized functionality. An increasing number of users are…
This paper reports on an audit study of generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Perplexity) which investigates how these new search engines construct responses and establish authority for topics of public importance. We collected…
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…
Social platforms such as Reddit have a network of communities of shared interests, with a prevalence of posts and comments from which one can infer users' Personal Information Identifiers (PIIs). While such self-disclosures can lead to…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…