Publications
PixelConfig: Longitudinal Measurement and Reverse-Engineering of Meta Pixel Configurations
Abdullah Ghani, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq
Under Submission
SoK: Advances and Open Problems in Web Tracking
Yash Vekaria, Yohan Beugin, Shaoor Munir, Gunes Acar, Nataliia Bielova, Steven Englehardt, Umar Iqbal, Alexandros Kapravelos, Pierre Laperdrix, Nick Nikiforakis, Jason Polakis, Franziska Roesner, Zubair Shafiq, Sebastian Zimmeck
Under Submission
[PDF]
Towards Multi-Stakeholder Vulnerability Notifications in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Yash Vekaria, Rishab Nithyanand, Zubair Shafiq
Under Submission
[PDF]
Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube’s Influencer Economy
Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Rishab Nithyanand
Under Submission
Big Help or Big Brother? Auditing Tracking, Profiling, and Personalization in Generative AI Assistants
Yash Vekaria, Aurelio Loris Canino, Jonathan Levitsky, Alex Ciechonski, Patricia Callejo, Anna Maria Mandalari, Zubair Shafiq
34th USENIX Security Symposium, 2025
Acceptance Rate: 19.0% (456/2400)
[PDF] [Code]
Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter’s Advertising Policy
Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou
Social Media + Society, 2025
[PDF] [Dataset]
Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs
Gianluca Anselmi, Yash Vekaria, Alexander D’Souza, Patricia Callejo, Anna Maria Mandalari, Zubair Shafiq
(*joint first-authors)
24th ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2024
Acceptance Rate: 21.73% (55/253)
[PDF] [Code] [Dataset]
The Inventory is Dark and Full of Misinformation: Understanding the Abuse of Ad Inventory Pooling in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Yash Vekaria, Rishab Nithyanand, Zubair Shafiq
45th IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), 2024
Acceptance Rate: 17.8% (261/1463)
[PDF] [Video] [Code] [Dataset]
Differential Tracking Across Topical Webpages of Indian News Media
Yash Vekaria, Vibhor Agarwal, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, Nishanth Sastry, Nicolas Kourtellis
13th ACM Web Science Conference (Virtual), 2021
[PDF] [Code] [Dataset]
Under the Spotlight: Web Tracking in Indian Partisan News Websites
Vibhor Agarwal, Yash Vekaria, Pushkal Agarwal, Sangeeta Mahapatra, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, Nishanth Sastry, Nicolas Kourtellis
15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Virtual), 2021
Acceptance Rate: 22.4% (30/134)
[PDF] [Code] [Dataset]
A Metadata-based Event Detection Method using Temporal Herding Factor and Social Synchrony on Twitter Data
Nirmal Kumar Sivaraman, Vibhor Agarwal, Yash Vekaria, Sakthi Balan Muthiah
15th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) (Virtual), 2021
[PDF] [Code] [Dataset]