Related papers: XRay: Enhancing the Web's Transparency with Differ…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
E-commerce web applications are almost ubiquitous in our day to day life, however as useful as they are, most of them have little to no adaptation to user needs, which in turn can cause both lower conversion rates as well as unsatisfied…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Google's Ad Settings shows the gender and age that Google has inferred about a web user. We compare the inferred values to the self-reported values of 501 survey participants. We find that Google often does not show an inference, but when…
In the last decade, the advertisement market spread significantly in the web and mobile app system. Its effectiveness is also due thanks to the possibility to target the advertisement on the specific interests of the actual user, other than…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
User profiling, the practice of collecting user information for personalized recommendations, has become widespread, driving progress in technology. However, this growth poses a threat to user privacy, as devices often collect sensitive…
Recent studies have shown that information disclosed on social network sites (such as Facebook) can be used to predict personal characteristics with surprisingly high accuracy. In this paper we examine a method to give online users…
Users increasingly rely on social media feeds for consuming daily information. The items in a feed, such as news, questions, songs, etc., usually result from the complex interplay of a user's social contacts, her interests and her actions…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
Data dashboards are designed to help users manage data collected about them. However, prior work showed that exposure to some dashboards, notably Google's My Activity dashboard, results in significant decreases in perceived concern and…
Every step we take in the digital world leaves behind a record of our behavior; a digital footprint. Research has suggested that algorithms can translate these digital footprints into accurate estimates of psychological characteristics,…
Web search data are a valuable source of business and economic information. Previous studies have utilized Google Trends web search data for economic forecasting. We expand this work by providing algorithms to combine and aggregate search…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
The rise of mobile apps has brought greater convenience and customization for users. However, many apps use analytics services to collect a wide range of user interaction data purportedly to improve their service, while presenting app users…
Computer Vision, and hence Artificial Intelligence-based extraction of information from images, has increasingly received attention over the last years, for instance in medical diagnostics. While the algorithms' complexity is a reason for…
Commercial establishments like restaurants, service centres and retailers have several sources of customer feedback about products and services, most of which need not be as structured as rated reviews provided by services like Yelp, or…