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Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
Data brokers collect and sell the personal information of millions of individuals, often without their knowledge or consent. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) grants consumers the legal right to request access to, or deletion of,…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Web browsers have been used widely by users to conduct various online activities, such as information seeking or online shopping. To improve user experience and extend the functionality of browsers, practitioners provide mechanisms to allow…
Third party tracking allows companies to identify users and track their behaviour across multiple digital services. This paper presents an empirical study of the prevalence of third-party trackers on 959,000 apps from the US and UK Google…
Web forms are one of the primary ways to collect personal information online, yet they are relatively under-studied. Unlike web tracking, data collection through web forms is explicit and contextualized. Users (i) are asked to input…
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…
Over the last decade, the number of devices per person has increased substantially. This poses a challenge for cookie-based personalization applications, such as online search and advertising, as it narrows the personalization signal to a…
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…
With the increasing concerns around privacy and the enforcement of data privacy laws, many websites now provide users with privacy controls. However, locating these controls can be challenging, as they are frequently hidden within multiple…
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…
Mobile devices that connect to the Internet via cellular networks are rapidly becoming the primary medium for accessing Web content. Cellular service providers (CSPs) commonly deploy Web proxies and other middleboxes for security,…
User quality of experience in the context of Web browsing is being researched widely, with plenty of developments occurring alongside technological advances, not seldom driven by big industry players. With the huge reach and infrastructure…
Modern distributed applications in healthcare, supply chain, and the Internet of Things handle a large amount of data in a diverse application setting with multiple stakeholders. Such applications leverage advanced artificial intelligence…
One of the Internet's greatest strengths is the degree to which it facilitates access to any of its resources from users anywhere in the world. However, users in the developing world have complained of websites blocking their countries. We…
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…
Privacy policies govern how personal data is collected, used, and shared. Yet, in most privacy-policy consent flows, agreement is operationalized as a single click at the end of a long, opaque policy document. Recent privacy-law scholarship…
As mobile computing becomes central to digital interaction, researchers have turned their attention to adaptive authentication for its real-time, context- and behavior-aware verification capabilities. However, many implementations remain…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…