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The number of computers, tablets and smartphones is increasing rapidly, which entails the ownership and use of multiple devices to perform online tasks. As people move across devices to complete these tasks, their identities becomes…
Browser extensions are third party programs, tightly integrated to browsers, where they execute with elevated privileges in order to provide users with additional functionalities. Unlike web applications, extensions are not subject to the…
The rise of cookie paywalls ('pay-or-ok' models) has prompted growing debates around the right to privacy and data protection, monetisation, and the legitimacy of user consent. Despite their increasing use across sectors, limited research…
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…
Modern websites include various types of third-party content such as JavaScript, images, stylesheets, and Flash objects in order to create interactive user interfaces. In addition to explicit inclusion of third-party content by website…
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…
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be used to…
The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this…
The enforcement of the GDPR led to the widespread adoption of consent notices, colloquially known as cookie banners. Studies have shown that many website operators do not comply with the law and track users prior to any interaction with the…
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…
On the modern web, trackers and advertisers frequently construct and monetize users' detailed behavioral profiles without consent. Despite various studies on web tracking mechanisms and advertisements, there has been no rigorous study…
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…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
Vulnerabilities in private networks are difficult to detect for attackers outside of the network. While there are known methods for port scanning internal hosts that work by luring unwitting internal users to an external web page that hosts…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
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)…
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 "eternal war in cache" has reached browsers, with multiple cache-based side-channel attacks and countermeasures being suggested. A common approach for countermeasures is to disable or restrict JavaScript features deemed essential for…
While much current web privacy research focuses on browser fingerprinting, the boring fact is that the majority of current third-party web tracking is conducted using traditional, persistent-state identifiers. One possible explanation for…
This paper investigates the accessibility of cookie notices on websites for users with visual impairments (VI) via a set of system studies on top UK websites (n=46) and a user study (n=100). We use a set of methods and tools--including…