Related papers: Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox
The use of sponsored product listings in prominent positions of consumer search results has made e-commerce platforms, which traditionally serve as marketplaces for third-party sellers to reach consumers, a major medium for those sellers to…
Google's recent update to the manifest file for Chrome browser extensions, transitioning from manifest version 2 (MV2) to manifest version 3 (MV3), has raised concerns among users and ad blocker providers, who worry that the new…
To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores…
People have a high level of trust in search engines, especially Google, but only limited knowledge of them, as numerous studies have shown. This leads to the question: To what extent is this trust justified considering the lack of…
Technology companies have gained unprecedented power and influence in recent years, resembling quasi-nation-states globally. Corporations with trillion-dollar market capitalizations are no longer just providers of digital services; they now…
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…
Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a…
There is no doubt that Search Engines are playing a great role in Internet usage. But all the top search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing are having a critical flaw called "Openness of a Search Engine". An Internet user should be allowed to…
This paper presents a sociotechnical vision for managing personal data, including cookies, within Web browsers. We first present our vision for a future of semi-automated data governance on the Web, using policy languages to describe data…
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…
The transparency and privacy behavior of mobile browsers has remained widely unexplored by the research community. In fact, as opposed to regular Android apps, mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end,…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
The rapid adoption of generative AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini is fundamentally reshaping information retrieval, moving from traditional ranked lists to synthesized, citation-backed answers. This shift…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
The availability of sophisticated technologies and methods of perpetrating criminogenic activities in the cyberspace is a pertinent societal problem. Darknet is an encrypted network technology that uses the internet infrastructure and can…
Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found that most users are either unaware of…
Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet…
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…
Online platforms have completely transformed American social life. They have democratized publication, overthrown old gatekeepers, and given ordinary Americans a fresh voice in politics. But the system is beginning to falter. Control over…