To protect consumer privacy, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates that businesses provide consumers with a straightforward way to opt out of the sale and sharing of their personal information. However, the control that businesses enjoy over the opt-out process allows them to impose hurdles on consumers aiming to opt out, including by employing dark patterns. Motivated by the enactment of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which strengthens the CCPA and explicitly forbids certain dark patterns in the opt-out process, we investigate how dark patterns are used in opt-out processes and assess their compliance with CCPA regulations. Our research reveals that websites employ a variety of dark patterns. Some of these patterns are explicitly prohibited under the CCPA; others evidently take advantage of legal loopholes. Despite the initial efforts to restrict dark patterns by policymakers, there is more work to be done.

Previous studies have measured encrypted DNS performance, but they have mostly focused on mainstream DNS resolvers [4, 6, 7]. We expand on previous studies, exploring the performance of all encrypted DNS resolvers—from a variety of global vantage points, as opposed to simply characterizing the mainstream DoH providers from well-connected vantage points. Our goal is to compare the performance of encrypted DNS resolvers to each other to understand the extent to which this larger set of DNS resolvers could be used by clients and applications in different regions.

Although home wireless networks (WiFi) are increasingly becoming performance bottlenecks, there are no research studies based on long-running field deployments that document this phenomenon. Given both public and private investment in broadband Internet infrastructure, a rigorous study of this phenomenon---and accompanying public data, based on open-source methods, is critical. To this end, this study pioneers a system and measurement technique to directly assess WiFi and access network performance. This study is first to continuously and contemporaneously measure Internet performance along two segments---the wireless client to the access point, and from the access point to the ISP access network. It is also the largest and longest-running study of its kind, with public data spanning more than two years (and counting), and, to our knowledge, the first such study in nearly a decade. Our study is based on data from over 22,000 joint measurements across more than 50 broadband access networks. Our findings have important implications for both the development of access technologies and Internet policy. Notably, for users with access links that exceed 800~Mbps, the user's wireless network was the performance bottleneck 100% of the time. Such inflection points will continue to evolve, yet the contributions of this paper include not only the results, but also open-source tools, data, and ongoing continuous measurements.