Related papers: Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox
Consumer agency in the digital age is increasingly constrained by systemic barriers and algorithmic manipulation, raising concerns about the authenticity of consumption choices. Nowadays, financial decisions are shaped by external pressures…
This report aims to report my thesis progress so far. My work attempts to show the differences in the perspectives of two search engines, Bing and Google on several selected controversial topics. In this work, we try to make a distinction…
As generative AI commercializes, competitive advantage is shifting from one-time model training toward continuous inference, distribution, and routing. At the frontier, large-scale inference can function as cognitive infrastructure: a…
Today, online privacy is the domain of regulatory measures and privacy-enhancing technologies. Transparency in the form of external and public assessments has been proposed for improving privacy and security because it exposes otherwise…
Enabling AI literacy in the general population at scale is a complex challenge requiring multiple stakeholders and institutions collaborating together. Industry and technology companies are important actors with respect to AI, and as a…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
The advent of ChatGPT, a large language model-powered chatbot, has prompted questions about its potential implications for traditional search engines. In this study, we investigate the differences in user behavior when employing search…
Online advertising fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although users can access most of the web services free of charge, they pay a heavy coston their privacy. They are forced to trust third parties and intermediaries, who not…
Context: The increasing reliance on Code Generation Tools (CGTs), such as Windsurf and GitHub Copilot, are revamping programming workflows and raising critical questions about fairness and inclusivity. While CGTs offer potential…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
The opaqueness of modern digital advertising, exemplified by platforms such as Meta Ads, raises concerns regarding their autonomous control over audience targeting, pricing structures, and ad relevancy assessments. Locked in their leading…
The hegemony of control over our search platforms by a few large corporations raises justifiable concerns, particularly in light of emerging geopolitical tensions and growing instances of ideological imposition by authoritarian actors to…
In-browser cryptojacking involves hijacking the CPU power of a website's visitor to perform CPU-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and has been on the rise, with 8500% growth during 2017. While some websites advocate cryptojacking as a…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Modern web browsers have effectively become the new operating system for business applications, yet their security posture is often under-scrutinized. This paper presents a novel, comprehensive Browser Security Posture Analysis…
The development of electronic commerce is characterized with anonymity, uncertainty, lack of control and potential opportunism. Therefore, the success of electronic commerce significantly depends on providing security and privacy for its…
There is a growing demand for transparency in search engines to understand how search results are curated and to enhance users' trust. Prior research has introduced search result explanations with a focus on how to explain, assuming…
The study we carried out enabled us to extract some conclusions, which are contrasted with the results obtained. First, in the field of mobile applications, permissions and tracers are almost always present. Android, as far as PlayStore…
App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by…
Rankings are ubiquitous in the online world today. As we have transitioned from finding books in libraries to ranking products, jobs, job applicants, opinions and potential romantic partners, there is a substantial precedent that ranking…