About me

I am a Post-Doctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, working with Sandra Siby's team. My research focuses on uncovering privacy risks on the web, such as tracking, fingerprinting, and user identification.

I obtained my Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique Paris and CNRS, at the CEDAR team, under the supervision of Oana Goga.

My Ph.D. thesis, titled “Computational Methods for Analyzing Risks with Information Exposure on Social Media”, focused on exploring risks associated with the online spread of information. I build and applied data-driven quantitative methodologies to collect and analyze large scale data from online systems. For instance, I built CheckMyNews, a software designed to automatically scrape and collect user data from online platforms, enabling external researchers to evaluate risks associated with these platforms.

Alongside my thesis, I also researched the privacy impact of advertising systems employed by privacy-focused search engines. I employed an automated crawling methodology to identify instances of online tracking when users interact with advertisements.

Prior to my thesis, I graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from the Higher National School of Computer Science ( ESI ) of Algiers (Algeria) in 2020. I did my final year internship at the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory in Grenoble (France).

Publications

• What News Do People Get on Social Media? Analyzing Exposure and Consumption of News through Data Donations
  Salim Chouaki, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Oana Goga, Savvas Zannettou
  ACM The Web Conference 2024
  PDF Code Data
• Understanding the privacy risks of popular search engine advertising systems
  Salim Chouaki, Oana Goga, Hamed Haddadi, Peter Snyder
  ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2023)
  PDF Code Data
• Exploring the Online Micro-targeting Practices of Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
  Salim Chouaki, Islem Bouzenia, Oana Goga, Beatrice Roussillon
  ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2022)
  PDF Code

Teaching

• 10/2023 - 12/2023 – Programming in C++
  Lab sessions (12 hours) at ENSAE
• 02/2023 - 05/2023 – Programming project in Python
  Lab sessions (18 hours) at ENSAE

Blogging

• Private search engines and traditional advertising platforms: uncovering the privacy risks
  Trustaware - October 2023
• Economic benefits vs Privacy concerns: the challenge with regulating online advertising
  Trustaware - November 2022