Related papers: Understanding Data Collection, Brokerage, and Spam…

This study explores the widespread perception that personal data, such as email addresses, may be shared or sold without informed user consent, investigating whether these concerns are reflected in actual practices of popular online…

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…

Email is a private medium of communication, and the inherent privacy constraints form a major obstacle in developing effective spam filtering methods which require access to a large amount of email data belonging to multiple users. To…

Unsolicited email (spam) is still a problem for users of the email service. Even though current email anti-spam solutions filter most spam emails, some spam emails still are delivered to the inbox of users. A special class of spam emails…

Network-based marketing refers to a collection of marketing techniques that take advantage of links between consumers to increase sales. We concentrate on the consumer networks formed using direct interactions (e.g., communications) between…

We provide an automated graph theoretic method for identifying individual users' trusted networks of friends in cyberspace. We routinely use our social networks to judge the trustworthiness of outsiders, i.e., to decide where to buy our…

Mobile devices with rich features can record videos, traffic parameters or air quality readings along user trajectories. Although such data may be valuable, users are seldom rewarded for collecting them. Emerging digital marketplaces allow…

In the digital age, e-commerce has transformed the way consumers shop, offering convenience and accessibility. Nevertheless, concerns about the privacy and security of personal information shared on these platforms have risen. In this work,…

Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build up DDoS attacks, spread malware. Our goal is to present a definite figure about the characteristics of spam and spam vulnerable email accounts. These evaluations help…

Since the global spread of Covid-19 began to overwhelm the attempts of governments to conduct manual contact-tracing, there has been much interest in using the power of mobile phones to automate the contact-tracing process through the…

In this work, we model the end-to-end pipeline of the advertising ecosystem, allowing us to identify two main issues with the current trajectory of private advertising proposals. First, prior work has largely considered ad targeting and…

In the electricity grid, networked sensors which record and transmit increasingly high-granularity data are being deployed. In such a setting, privacy concerns are a natural consideration. We present an attack model for privacy breaches,…

LLM app (tool) ecosystems are rapidly evolving to support sophisticated use cases that often require extensive user data collection. Given that LLM apps are developed by third parties and anecdotal evidence indicating inconsistent…

An increasing number of mental health services are offered through mobile systems, a paradigm called mHealth. Although there is an unprecedented growth in the adoption of mHealth systems, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about…

Spam phone calls have been rapidly growing from nuisance to an increasingly effective scam delivery tool. To counter this increasingly successful attack vector, a number of commercial smartphone apps that promise to block spam phone calls…

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…

The short message service (SMS) was introduced a generation ago to the mobile phone users. They make up the world's oldest large-scale network, with billions of users and therefore attracts a lot of fraud. Due to the convergence of mobile…

There is a tremendous increase in spam traffic these days. Spam messages muddle up users inbox, consume network resources, and build up DDoS attacks, spread worms and viruses. Our goal is to present a definite figure about the…

Epidemiologic studies of infectious diseases often rely on models of contact networks to capture the complex interactions that govern disease spread, and ongoing projects aim to vastly increase the scale at which such data can be collected.…

Large language model (LLM) services have been rapidly integrated into people's daily lives as chatbots and agentic systems. They are nourished by collecting rich streams of data, raising privacy concerns around excessive collection of…