Related papers: The Privacy-Utility Trade-off in the Topics API
The Topics API for the web is Google's privacy-enhancing alternative to replace third-party cookies. Results of prior work have led to an ongoing discussion between Google and research communities about the capability of Topics to trade off…
Third-party cookies have been a privacy concern since cookies were first developed in the mid 1990s, but more strict cookie policies were only introduced by Internet browser vendors in the early 2010s. More recently, due to regulatory…
Web tracking through third-party cookies is considered a threat to users' privacy and is supposed to be abandoned in the near future. Recently, Google proposed the Topics API framework as a privacy-friendly alternative for behavioural…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Integrating Google's Topics API into the digital advertising ecosystem represents a significant shift toward privacy-conscious advertising practices. This article analyses the implications of implementing Topics API on ad networks, focusing…
The analysis of the privacy properties of Privacy-Preserving Ads APIs is an area of research that has received strong interest from academics, industry, and regulators. Despite this interest, the empirical study of these methods is hindered…
We propose a novel problem formulation to address the privacy-utility tradeoff, specifically when dealing with two distinct user groups characterized by unique sets of private and utility attributes. Unlike previous studies that primarily…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
Compact user representations (such as embeddings) form the backbone of personalization services. In this work, we present a new theoretical framework to measure re-identification risk in such user representations. Our framework, based on…
The paper discusses the legal requirements and implications of the processing of information and personal data for advertising purposes, particularly in the light of the "Planet49" decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the…
The Privacy Sandbox initiative from Google includes APIs for enabling privacy-preserving advertising functionalities as part of the effort around limiting third-party cookies. In particular, the Private Aggregation API (PAA) and the…
While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population…
This paper studies the tradeoff in privacy and utility in a single-trial multi-terminal guessing (estimation) framework using a system model that is inspired by index coding. There are $n$ independent discrete sources at a data curator.…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
Ensuring the usefulness of electronic data sources while providing necessary privacy guarantees is an important unsolved problem. This problem drives the need for an analytical framework that can quantify the safety of personally…
Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's propensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain gratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and utility…
The Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is a series of proposals from Google to reduce ``cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all''. Over the years, Google implemented, experimented,…
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users' private information…
In 2020, Google announced it would disable third-party cookies in the Chrome browser to improve user privacy. In order to continue to enable interest-based advertising while mitigating risks of individualized user tracking, Google proposed…
A growing concern with advertisement libraries on Android is their ability to exfiltrate personal information from their host applications. While previous work has looked at the libraries' abilities to measure private information on their…