Related papers: Browsing without Third-Party Cookies: What Do You …
The enforcement of the GDPR led to the widespread adoption of consent notices, colloquially known as cookie banners. Studies have shown that many website operators do not comply with the law and track users prior to any interaction with the…
The virtual dimension called `Cyberspace' built on internet technologies has served people's daily lives for decades. Now it offers advanced services and connected experiences with the developing pervasive computing technologies that…
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…
Online Social Networking Sites attracted a massive number of users over the past decade but also raised privacy concerns with the amount of personal information disclosed. Studies have shown that 25% of the users are not aware of privacy…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
With the impending removal of third-party cookies from major browsers and the introduction of new privacy-preserving advertising APIs, the research community has a timely opportunity to assist industry in qualitatively improving the Web's…
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires websites to ask for consent to the use of cookies for \emph{specific purposes}. This enlarges the relevant design space for consent dialogs. Websites could try to…
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,…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online…
The main goal of this paper is to study how often cookie banners that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) contain aesthetic manipulation, a design tactic to draw users' attention to the button that permits personal…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
Online tracking remains problematic, with compliance and ethical issues persisting despite regulatory efforts. Consent interfaces, the visible manifestation of this industry, have seen significant attention over the years. We present robust…
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, leads to important changes in this area: companies are now required to ask for users' consent before collecting and sharing personal data and by law…
The new information and communication technology providers collect increasing amounts of personal data, a lot of which is user generated. Unless use policies are privacy-friendly, this leaves users vulnerable to privacy risks such as…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
In the past decade, global warming made several headlines and turned the attention of the whole world to it. Carbon footprint is the main factor that drives greenhouse emissions up and results in the temperature increase of the planet with…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…