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Despite stringent data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other country-specific regulations, many websites continue to use cookies to track user…
Much of the recent excitement around decentralized finance (DeFi) comes from hopes that DeFi can be a secure, private, less centralized alternative to traditional finance systems. However, people moving to DeFi sites in hopes of improving…
TikTok has been criticized for its low privacy standards, but little is known about how its adolescent users protect their privacy. Based on interviews with 54 adolescents in Switzerland, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of…
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…
Bots constitute a significant portion of Internet traffic and are a source of various issues across multiple domains. Modern bots often become indistinguishable from real users, as they employ similar methods to browse the web, including…
Third-party Software Development Kits (SDKs) are widely adopted in Android app development, to effortlessly accelerate development pipelines and enhance app functionality. However, this convenience raises substantial concerns about…
Recent work in traffic analysis has shown that traffic patterns leaked through side channels can be used to recover important semantic information. For instance, attackers can find out which website, or which page on a website, a user is…
Differential Privacy (DP) has emerged as a pivotal approach for safeguarding individual privacy in data analysis, yet its practical adoption is often hindered by challenges in the implementation and communication of DP. This paper presents…
Web tracking (WT) systems are advanced technologies used to monitor and analyze online user behavior. Initially focused on HTML and static webpages, these systems have evolved with the proliferation of IoT, edge computing, and Big Data,…
Many popular applications use traces of user data to offer various services to their users. However, even if user data is anonymized and obfuscated, a user's privacy can be compromised through the use of statistical matching techniques that…
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, leads to important changes in this area: companies are now required to ask for users' consent before collecting and sharing personal data and by law…
Authenticating websites is an ongoing problem for users. Recent proposals have suggested strengthening current server authentication methods by incorporating website location as a comprehensible additional trust factor. In this work, we…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
ChatGPT has quickly advanced from simple natural language processing to tackling more sophisticated and specialized tasks. Drawing inspiration from the success of mobile app ecosystems, OpenAI allows developers to create applications that…
The ever increasing popularity of Facebook and other Online Social Networks has left a wealth of personal and private data on the web, aggregated and readily accessible for broad and automatic retrieval. Protection from both undesired…
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.…
Data collection and aggregation by online services happens to an extent that is often beyond awareness and comprehension of its users. Transparency tools become crucial to inform people, though it is unclear how well they work. To…
Opaque algorithms disseminate and mediate the content that users consume on online social media platforms. This algorithmic mediation serves users with contents of their liking, on the other hand, it may cause several inadvertent risks to…
As e-commerce continues to expand, the urgency for stronger privacy and security measures becomes increasingly critical, particularly on platforms frequented by younger users who are often less aware of potential risks. In our analysis of…
End users' awareness about the data they share, the purpose of sharing that data, and their control over it, is key to establishing trust and eradicating privacy concerns. We experimented on personal data management by prototyping a…