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Data collection and aggregation by online services happens to an extent that is often beyond awareness and comprehension of its users. Transparency tools become crucial to inform people, though it is unclear how well they work. To…
As a result of the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, European users encounter cookie banners on almost every website. Many of such banners are implemented by Consent Management Providers (CMPs), who respect the IAB Europe's Transparency and…
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII…
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…
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018. Its privacy regulations apply to any service and company collecting or processing personal data in Europe. Many companies had to adjust their…
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…
The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
In this work, we analyze the legal requirements on how cookie banners are supposed to be implemented to be fully compliant with the e-Privacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation. Our contribution resides in the definition…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major…
Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for…
The research community has deemed cookie synchronization detection an inherently challenging task. Studies aiming to identify cookie synchronizations often share high-level design choices, but deviate amongst low-level implementations. For…
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…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
As e-commerce continues to expand, the urgency for stronger privacy and security measures becomes increasingly critical, particularly on platforms frequented by younger users who are often less aware of potential risks. In our analysis of…
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) secures the right to Opt-Out for consumers in California. However, websites may implement complex consent mechanisms that potentially do not capture the user's true choices. We investigated the…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
The GDPR requires websites to facilitate the right to revoke consent from Web users. While numerous studies measured compliance of consent with the various consent requirements, no prior work has studied consent revocation on the Web.…