Analyzing the Use of CNAME Cloaking in the Wild

CNAME (Canonical Name) cloaking has emerged as a deceptive technique employed by website operators to obfuscate the true origin of their content. This master thesis aims to comprehensively examine the utilization and prevalence of CNAME cloaking across the web.<br/><br/>To achieve this, a custom program was developed to crawl websites and gather...

Reverse Engineering of Web Cookies: When is too late for your private data?

Nowadays, the online industry contributes to a multi-billion dollar business, facilitates most of the population's everyday activities, and processes vast amounts of data, including personal data. Current work aims to explore the inconsistency or consistency of the content obtained by the websites to generate cookies based on various data that...

Tracking Cookies in the European Union, an Empirical Analysis of the Current Situation

Tracking is a pervasive mechanism across the web which is capable to trace and collect users’ online data. One of the most widely used mechanisms for tracking are cookies, and they are used to deliver online behavioral advertisement. Since these mechanisms pose a threat to privacy, the E-Privacy Directive was created as the regional legal...

Flowr: Enhancing Dynamic Market Audience Creation

Omnicom Media Group (OMG) is a company heavily involved in marketing and advertising. Our client is Annalect, a solutions provider that helps the marketers of OMG to make data actionable. OMG has processed cookie data to help their marketers set up advertisement campaigns. They buy this cookie data from a 3rd party. They also manage, however, a...

Kim's Cookies: Finding brand relevance in the cookie market

Brand relevance theory by David Aaker (2011) was used to set up a cookie brand called Kim’s Cookies. The main objective for this cookie brand is to challenge the rigid market that is dominated by the big brands, by starting a new category. According to Aaker (2011), brands can reach relevance by following 4 steps: (1) create a new category, (2)...