Related papers: Tracker Installations Are Not Created Equal: Under…
While companies increasingly rely on data, especially when it comes to targeted advertising, adapting content to users, selling data and training machine learning models, the collection of data raises privacy concerns. One way of collecting…
Online user privacy and tracking have been extensively studied in recent years, especially due to privacy and personal data-related legislations in the EU and the USA, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, ePrivacy Regulation, and…
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…
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach…
The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic…
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…
Over the past few years, online service providers have started gathering increasing amounts of personal information to build user profiles and monetize them with advertisers and data brokers. Users have little control of what information is…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and many options for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data, with privacy policies often failing to reveal the types of…
Most online services (Google, Facebook etc.) operate by providing a service to users for free, and in return they collect and monetize personal information (PI) of the users. This operational model is inherently economic, as the "good"…
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…
Many smartphone apps transmit personally identifiable information (PII), often without the users knowledge. To address this issue, we present PrivacyProxy, a system that monitors outbound network traffic and generates app-specific…
The pervasiveness of Internet of Things results in vast volumes of personal data generated by smart devices of users (data producers) such as smart phones, wearables and other embedded sensors. It is a common requirement, especially for Big…
In 2002, the European Union (EU) introduced the ePrivacy Directive to regulate the usage of online tracking technologies. Its aim is to make tracking mechanisms explicit while increasing privacy awareness in users. It mandates websites to…
Most search engines can potentially infer the preferences and interests of a user based on her history of search queries. While search engines can use these inferences for a variety of tasks, including targeted advertisements, such tasks do…
This PhD thesis discusses how European law could improve privacy protection in the area of behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting, also referred to as online profiling, involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the…
In recent years, the amount of information collected about human beings has increased dramatically. This development has been partially driven by individuals posting and storing data about themselves and friends using online social networks…
The Google Play marketplace has introduced the Data Safety section to improve transparency regarding how mobile applications (apps) collect, share, and protect user data. This mechanism requires developers to disclose privacy and…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems into technologies used by young digital citizens raises significant privacy concerns. This study investigates these concerns through a comparative analysis of stakeholder perspectives.…