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The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers' Web browsing data without their consent.…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
The technical literature about data privacy largely consists of two complementary approaches: formal definitions of conditions sufficient for privacy preservation and attacks that demonstrate privacy breaches. Differential privacy is an…
Recommender Systems (RSs) are exploited by various business enterprises to suggest their products (items) to consumers (users). Collaborative filtering (CF) is a widely used variant of RSs which learns hidden patterns from user-item…
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…
Compliance with the European Union's Platform-to-Business (P2B) Regulation is challenging for online platforms, and assessing their compliance can be difficult for public authorities. This is partly due to the lack of automated tools for…
Mobile apps bring us many conveniences, such as online shopping and communication, but some use malicious designs called dark patterns to trick users into doing things that are not in their best interest. Many works have been done to…
In an emerging trend, more and more Internet users search for information from Community Question and Answer (CQA) websites, as interactive communication in such websites provides users with a rare feeling of trust. More often than not, end…
Users disclose ever-increasing amounts of personal data on Social Network Service platforms (SNS). Unless SNSs' policies are privacy friendly, this leaves them vulnerable to privacy risks because they ignore the privacy policies. Designers…
The proliferation of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents in web browsing scenarios present complex unintended consequences (UCs). This paper characterizes three UCs from three perspectives: phenomena,…
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.…
Modern websites include various types of third-party content such as JavaScript, images, stylesheets, and Flash objects in order to create interactive user interfaces. In addition to explicit inclusion of third-party content by website…
Automated browsers are widely used to study the web at scale. Their premise is that they measure what regular browsers would encounter on the web. In practice, deviations due to detection of automation have been found. To what extent…
The investigation of the browsing behavior of users provides useful information to optimize web site design, web browser design, search engines offerings, and online advertisement. This has been a topic of active research since the Web…
Being able to check whether an online advertisement has been targeted is essential for resolving privacy controversies and implementing in practice data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA. In this paper we describe the…
Interest in unethical user interfaces has grown in HCI over recent years, with researchers identifying malicious design strategies referred to as ''dark patterns''. While such strategies have been described in numerous domains, we lack a…
Privacy preference signals allow users to express preferences over how their personal data is processed. These signals become important in determining privacy outcomes when they reference an enforceable legal basis, as is the case with…
To drive purchase in online advertising, it is of the advertiser's great interest to optimize the sequential advertising strategy whose performance and interpretability are both important. The lack of interpretability in existing deep…
Disinformation and fake news have posed detrimental effects on individuals and society in recent years, attracting broad attention to fake news detection. The majority of existing fake news detection algorithms focus on mining news content…
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…