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            Web forms are one of the primary ways to collect personal information online, yet they are relatively under-studied. Unlike web tracking, data collection through web forms is explicit and contextualized. Users (i) are asked to input specific personal information types, and (ii) know the specific context (i.e., on which website and for what purpose). For web forms to be trusted by users, they must meet the common sense standards of appropriate data collection practices within a particular context (i.e., privacy norms). In this paper, we extract the privacy norms embedded within web forms through a measurement study. First, we build a specialized crawler to discover web forms on websites. We run it on 11,500 popular websites, and we create a dataset of 293K web forms. Second, to process data of this scale, we develop a cost-efficient way to annotate web forms with form types and personal information types, using text classifiers trained with assistance of large language models (LLMs). Third, by analyzing the annotated dataset, we reveal common patterns of data collection practices. We find that (i) these patterns are explained by functional necessities and legal obligations, thus reflecting privacy norms, and that (ii) deviations from the observed norms often signal unnecessary data collection. In addition, we analyze the privacy policies that accompany web forms. We show that, despite their wide adoption and use, there is a disconnect between privacy policy disclosures and the observed privacy norms.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026
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            Virtual reality (VR) platforms enable a wide range of applications, however, pose unique privacy risks. In particular, VR devices are equipped with a rich set of sensors that collect personal and sensitive information (e.g., body motion, eye gaze, hand joints, and facial expression). The data from these newly available sensors can be used to uniquely identify a user, even in the absence of explicit identifiers. In this paper, we seek to understand the extent to which a user can be identified based solely on VR sensor data, within and across real-world apps from diverse genres. We consider adversaries with capabilities that range from observing APIs available within a single app (app adversary) to observing all or selected sensor measurements across multiple apps on the VR device (device adversary). To that end, we introduce BehaVR, a framework for collecting and analyzing data from all sensor groups collected by multiple apps running on a VR device. We use BehaVR to collect data from real users that interact with 20 popular real-world apps. We use that data to build machine learning models for user identification within and across apps, with features extracted from available sensor data. We show that these models can identify users with an accuracy of up to 100%, and we reveal the most important features and sensor groups, depending on the functionality of the app and the adversary. To the best of our knowledge, BehaVR is the first to analyze user identification in VR comprehensively, i.e., considering all sensor measurements available on consumer VR devices, collected by multiple real-world, as opposed to custom-made, apps.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available January 1, 2026
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            A<sc>bstract</sc> In studying secondary gamma-ray emissions from Primordial Black Holes (PBHs), the production of scalar particles like pions and axion-like particles (ALPs) via Hawking radiation is crucial. While previous analyses assumed relativistic production, asteroid-mass PBHs, relevant to upcoming experiments like AMEGO-X, likely produce pions and ALPs non-relativistically when their masses exceed 10 MeV. To account for mass dependence in Hawking radiation, we revisit the greybody factors for massive scalars from Schwarzschild black holes, revealing significant mass corrections to particle production rates compared to the projected AMEGO-X sensitivity. We highlight the importance of considering non-relativisticĪ0production in interpreting PBH gamma-ray signals, essential for determining PBH properties. Additionally, we comment on the potential suppression of pion production due to form factor effects when producing extended objects via Hawking radiation. We also provide an example code for calculating the Hawking radiation spectrum of massive scalar particles Image missing<#comment/>.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available November 1, 2025
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            Privacy policies disclose how an organization collects and handles personal information. Recent work has made progress in leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to automate privacy policy analysis and extract data collection statements from different sentences, considered in isolation from each other. In this paper, we view and analyze, for the first time, the entire text of a privacy policy in an integrated way. In terms of methodology: (1) we define PoliGraph , a type of knowledge graph that captures statements in a privacy policy as relations between different parts of the text; and (2) we develop an NLP-based tool, PoliGraph-er , to automatically extract PoliGraph from the text. In addition, (3) we revisit the notion of ontologies, previously defined in heuristic ways, to capture subsumption relations between terms. We make a clear distinction between local and global ontologies to capture the context of individual privacy policies, application domains, and privacy laws. Using a public dataset for evaluation, we show that PoliGraph-er identifies 40% more collection statements than prior state-of-the-art, with 97% precision. In terms of applications, PoliGraph enables automated analysis of a corpus of privacy policies and allows us to: (1) reveal common patterns in the texts across different privacy policies, and (2) assess the correctness of the terms as defined within a privacy policy. We also apply PoliGraph to: (3) detect contradictions in a privacy policy, where we show false alarms by prior work, and (4) analyze the consistency of privacy policies and network traffic, where we identify significantly more clear disclosures than prior work.more » « less
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