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Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
Nowadays, mobile users have a vast number of applications and services at their disposal. Each of these might impose some privacy threats on users' "Personally Identifiable Information" (PII). Location privacy is a crucial part of PII, and…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
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…
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…
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,…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
Using Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for machine learning often influences the characteristics of a machine learning approach, e.g., the needed computational power, timing of the answers or how the data can be utilized. When…
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.…
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…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…
A dominant regulatory model for web privacy is "notice and choice". In this model, users are notified of data collection and provided with options to control it. To examine the efficacy of this approach, this study presents the first…
The World Wide Web, a ubiquitous source of information, serves as a primary resource for countless individuals, amassing a vast amount of data from global internet users. However, this online data, when scraped, indexed, and utilized for…
Web tracking (WT) systems are advanced technologies used to monitor and analyze online user behavior. Initially focused on HTML and static webpages, these systems have evolved with the proliferation of IoT, edge computing, and Big Data,…
`Tracking' is the collection of data about an individual's activity across multiple distinct contexts and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred. This paper aims to…
The privacy implications of third-party tracking is a well-studied problem. Recent research has shown that besides data aggregators and behavioral advertisers, online social networks also act as trackers via social widgets. Existing cookie…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and customization for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data purportedly to improve their service, while presenting app users…
This paper focuses on some shortcomings in current privacy and data protection regulations' ability to adequately address the ramifications of AI-driven data processing practices, in particular where data sets are combined and processed by…
Many studies have exposed the massive collection of personal data in the digital ecosystem through, for instance, websites, mobile apps, or smart devices. This fact goes unnoticed by most users, who are also unaware that the collectors are…