相关论文: Anatomy of the Third-Party Web Tracking Ecosystem

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…

On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and…

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…

Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…

Third-party tracking, the collection and sharing of behavioural data about individuals, is a significant and ubiquitous privacy threat in mobile apps. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to protect…

Health information websites offer instantaneous access to information, but have important privacy implications as they can associate a visitor with specific medical conditions. We interviewed 35 residents of Canada to better understand…

Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…

This paper performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web, to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they did not directly load. Although the majority (84.91%) of websites have short dependency chains…

Context-aware reasoning systems allow drawing sophisticated inferences about users' behaviour and physiological condition, by aggregating data from seemingly unrelated sources. We conducted a general population online survey to evaluate…

We examine the extent of needless traffic exposure by the routing infrastructure to nations geographically irrelevant to packet transmission. We quantify what countries are geographically logical to observe on a network path traveling…

The modern web is increasingly characterized by the pervasiveness of Surveillance Capitalism. This investigation employs an empirical approach to examine this phenomenon through the web tracking practices of major tech companies --…

The Web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, where websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. However, the latter can further load resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this…

The collapse of social contexts has been amplified by digital infrastructures but surprisingly received insufficient attention from Web privacy scholars. Users are persistently identified within and across distinct Web contexts, in varying…

The topology of the Internet and its geographic properties received significant attention during the last years, not only because they have a deep impact on the performance experienced by users, but also because of legal, political, and…

The steady reports of privacy invasions online paints a picture of the Internet growing into a more dangerous place. This is supported by reports of the potential scale for online harms facilitated by the mass deployment of online…

Almost all popular Internet services are hosted in a select set of countries, forcing other nations to rely on international connectivity to access them. We infer instances where traffic towards a large portion of a country is serviced by a…

In the early age of the internet users enjoyed a large level of anonymity. At the time web pages were just hypertext documents; almost no personalisation of the user experience was o ered. The Web today has evolved as a world wide…

As our lives migrate to the digital realm, our online identity has evolved to become an increasingly robust collection of data about every aspect of our online and offline lives. This data is extremely appealing to companies who wish to use…

The widespread adoption of continuously connected smartphones and tablets developed the usage of mobile applications, among which many use location to provide geolocated services. These services provide new prospects for users: getting…

Privacy has deteriorated in the world wide web ever since the 1990s. The tracking of browsing habits by different third-parties has been at the center of this deterioration. Web cookies and so-called web beacons have been the classical ways…