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As more users adopt VPNs for a variety of reasons, it is important to develop empirical knowledge of their needs and mental models of what a VPN offers. Moreover, studying VPN users alone is not enough because, by using a VPN, a user…
While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention. The understanding and identification of…
Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions are used to connect private networks securely over the Internet. Besides their benefits in corporate environments, VPNs are also marketed to privacy-minded users to preserve their privacy, and to…
YouTube has evolved into a powerful platform where creators monetize their influence through affiliate marketing, raising concerns about transparency and ethics, especially when creators fail to disclose their affiliate relationships.…
Influencer marketing has become a widely used strategy for reaching customers. Despite growing interest among influencers and brand partners in predicting engagement with influencer videos, there has been little research on the relative…
The rapid advancement of Visual Language Models (VLMs) has enabled sophisticated analysis of visual content, leading to concerns about the inference of sensitive user attributes and subsequent privacy risks. While technical capabilities of…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
In January 2019, YouTube announced it would exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations but allow such videos to remain on the platform. While this step intends to reduce YouTube's role in propagating such content,…
Faced with the challenge of attracting user attention and revenue, social media websites have turned to video advertisements (video-ads). While in traditional media the video-ad market is mostly based on an interaction between content…
YouTube is a popular video platform for sharing creative content and ideas, targeting different demographics. Adults, older children, and young children are all avid viewers of YouTube videos. Meanwhile, countless young-kid-oriented…
Online advertisements that masquerade as non-advertising content pose numerous risks to users. Such hidden advertisements appear on social media platforms when content creators or "influencers" endorse products and brands in their content.…
Influencer marketing involves a wide range of strategies in which brands collaborate with popular content creators (i.e., influencers) to leverage their reach, trust, and impact on their audience to promote and endorse products or services.…
The share of videos in the internet traffic has been growing, therefore understanding how videos capture attention on a global scale is also of growing importance. Most current research focus on modeling the number of views, but we argue…
YouTube, with millions of content creators, has become the preferred destination for watching videos online. Through the Partner program, YouTube allows content creators to monetize their popular videos. Of significant importance for…
The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) introduces profound privacy risks from personal videos. This paper addresses the critical yet unexplored inferential privacy threat, the risk of inferring sensitive personal attributes over…
YouTube, a widely popular online platform, has transformed the dynamics of con-tent consumption and interaction for users worldwide. With its extensive range of content crea-tors and viewers, YouTube serves as a hub for video sharing,…
Recent years have seen a new form of advertisement campaigns emerge: those involving so-called social media influencers. These influencers accept money in return for promoting products via their social media feeds. Although this constitutes…
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are a crucial Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) leveraged by millions of users and catered by multiple VPN providers worldwide; thus, understanding the user preferences for the choice of VPN apps should be…
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) helps to mitigate security and privacy risks of data transmitting on unsecured network such as public Wi-Fi. However, despite awareness of public Wi-Fi risks becoming increasingly common, the use of VPN when…
This thesis can be categorized under the Influencer Marketing industry with respect to social media initiatives. Influencer marketing is a modern tactic used by brands to enhance their visibility to their target audience by using the…