Related papers: PriveShield: Enhancing User Privacy Using Automati…
We measure how effective Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are at protecting users from website fingerprinting. Our measurements use both experimental and observational methods. Experimental methods allow control, precision, and use on…
Differential privacy is an information theoretic constraint on algorithms and code. It provides quantification of privacy leakage and formal privacy guarantees that are currently considered the gold standard in privacy protections. In this…
Online social networks have enabled new methods and modalities of collaboration and sharing. These advances bring privacy concerns: online social data is more accessible and persistent and simultaneously less contextualized than traditional…
Phishing is the combination of social engineering and technical exploits designed to convince a victim to provide personal information, usually for the monetary gain of the attacker. Phishing has become the most popular practice among the…
This article provides a quantitative analysis of privacy-compromising mechanisms on 1 million popular websites. Findings indicate that nearly 9 in 10 websites leak user data to parties of which the user is likely unaware; more than 6 in 10…
Over the past years, advertisement companies have used various tracking methods to persistently track users across the web. Such tracking methods usually include first and third-party cookies, cookie synchronization, as well as a variety of…
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 increased screen time and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a significant surge in cases of online grooming, which is the use of strategies by predators to lure children into sexual exploitation. Previous efforts to…
In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…
Privacy regulations such as the CCPA and GDPR grant individuals rights over their personal data, yet it remains challenging for most users to exercise them in practice due to vague policy interpretation and unapproachable settings on web…
Digital fingerprints have brought great convenience and benefits to many online businesses. However, they pose a significant threat to the privacy and security of ordinary users. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of current…
Many popular applications use traces of user data to offer various services to their users. However, even if user data is anonymized and obfuscated, a user's privacy can be compromised through the use of statistical matching techniques that…
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…
Real-time, online-editing web apps provide free and convenient services for collaboratively editing, sharing and storing files. The benefits of these web applications do not come for free: not only do service providers have full access to…
Personalization despite being an effective solution to the problem information overload remains tricky on account of multiple dimensions to consider. Furthermore, the challenge of avoiding overdoing personalization involves estimation of a…
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…
Modern websites frequently use and embed third-party services to facilitate web development, connect to social media, or for monetization. This often introduces privacy issues as the inclusion of third-party services on a website can allow…
The shuffle model of Differential Privacy (DP) is an enhanced privacy protocol which introduces an intermediate trusted server between local users and a central data curator. It significantly amplifies the central DP guarantee by…
Loyalty programs are promoted by vendors to incentivize loyalty in buyers. Although such programs have become widespread, they have been criticized by business experts and consumer associations: loyalty results in profiling and hence in…
User profiling, the practice of collecting user information for personalized recommendations, has become widespread, driving progress in technology. However, this growth poses a threat to user privacy, as devices often collect sensitive…