Günes Acar

Research

Privacy analysis of Web and mobile applications

  • Device/browser fingerprinting
  • Online tracking
  • Developing tools for large-scale Web privacy studies

Latest work

In charge of

  • Working for Privacy in Social Networks (FWO) project.
  • Asisting exercise sessions of the Privacy Technologies course

Master thesis supervision

  • (Second reader) Mobile STORIES – Mobile news aggregator and interactive filtering (Jorge Luis Aguilar Diaz, Master of Artificial Intelligence, 2013)

Biography

  • BSc. in Electrical and Electronics  Engineering (2002) at METU, Ankara
  • Worked as a software engineer at METU-Technopolis (2002-07)
  • Research assistant at Faculty of Communication, Ankara University (2007-2012)
  • MSc. in Linguistics at Ankara University (2009)
  • PhD, Journalism, Informatics Branch, Ankara University (2009-?)
  • Pre-doctoral student at KU Leuven (2012-2013)
  • PhD student at KU Leuven (2013-…)

Publications

1. C. Diaz, L. Olejnik, G. Acar, and C. Casteluccia, "The leaking battery: A privacy analysis of the HTML5 Battery Status API," Technical Report, 8 pages, 2015.
2. G. Acar, B. Van Alsenoy, F. Piessens, C. Diaz, and B. Preneel, "Facebook Tracking Through Social Plug-ins," Technical report prepared for the Belgian Privacy Commission, 24 pages, 2015.
3. S. Preibusch, T. Peetz, G. Acar, and B. Berendt, "Purchase details leaked to PayPal (Short Paper)," In Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 19th International Conference, FC 2015, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 10 pages, 2015.
4. G. Acar, C. Eubank, S. Englehardt, M. Juarez, A. Narayanan, and C. Diaz, "The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild," In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, pp. 674-689, 2014.
5. M. Juarez, S. Afroz, G. Acar, C. Diaz, and R. Greenstadt, "A Critical Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks," In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, pp. 263-274, 2014.
6. N. Nikiforakis, G. Acar, and D. Salinger, "Browse at your own risk," IEEE Spectrum Magazine 35(8), pp. 30-35, 2014.
7. G. Acar, M. Juarez, N. Nikiforakis, C. Diaz, S. Gürses, F. Piessens, and B. Preneel, "FPDetective: Dusting the web for fingerprinters," In 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, pp. 1129-1140, 2013.
All publications...