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Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
Ensuring user privacy remains a critical concern within mobile cellular networks, particularly given the proliferation of interconnected devices and services. In fact, a lot of user privacy issues have been raised in 2G, 3G, 4G/LTE…
The widespread adoption of continuously connected smartphones and tablets developed the usage of mobile applications, among which many use location to provide geolocated services. These services provide new prospects for users: getting…
The balance between protecting users' privacy while providing cost-effective devices that are functional and usable is a key challenge in the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) industry. While in traditional desktop and mobile contexts the…
Privacy preference signals are digital representations of how users want their personal data to be processed. Such signals must be adopted by both the sender (users) and intended recipients (data processors). Adoption represents a…
Consider two brands that want to jointly test alternate web experiences for their customers with an A/B test. Such collaborative tests are today enabled using \textit{third-party cookies}, where each brand has information on the identity of…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
The growth in the use of online advertising to foster brand awareness over recent years is largely attributable to the ubiquity of social media. One pivotal technology contributing to the success of online brand advertising is frequency…
Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid…
The rise of online social networks, user-gene-rated content, and third-party apps made data sharing an inevitable trend, driven by both user behavior and the commercial value of personal information. As service providers amass vast amounts…
In this paper, we show how to exploit real-time communication applications to determine the IP address of a targeted user. We focus our study on Skype, although other real-time communication applications may have similar privacy issues. We…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Protecting personal information privacy has become a controversial issue among online social network providers and users. Most social network providers have developed several techniques to decrease threats and risks to the users privacy.…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
Tracking is a highly privacy-invasive data collection practice that has been ubiquitous in mobile apps for many years due to its role in supporting advertising-based revenue models. In response, Apple introduced two significant changes with…
Mobile devices that connect to the Internet via cellular networks are rapidly becoming the primary medium for accessing Web content. Cellular service providers (CSPs) commonly deploy Web proxies and other middleboxes for security,…
Website fingerprinting enables an attacker to infer which web page a client is browsing through encrypted or anonymized network connections. We present a new website fingerprinting technique based on random decision forests and evaluate…
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are increasingly deployed at home, at work, and in other shared and public spaces. IoT devices collect and share data with service providers and third parties, which poses privacy concerns. Although privacy…