Related papers: FilterPlus: A real-time content filtering extensio…
When surfing the Internet, individuals leak personal and corporate information to third parties whose (legitimate or not) businesses revolve around the value of collected data. The implications are serious, from a person unwillingly…
By filtering the content that users see, social media platforms have the ability to influence users' perceptions and decisions, from their dining choices to their voting preferences. This influence has drawn scrutiny, with many calling for…
Prior research has shown how 'content preview tools' improve speed and accuracy of user relevance judgements across different information retrieval tasks. This paper describes a novel user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, designed to…
Collaborative filtering recommendation systems provide recommendations to users based on their own past preferences, as well as those of other users who share similar interests. The use of recommendation systems has grown widely in recent…
With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect…
Internet users highly rely on and trust web search engines, such as Google, to find relevant information online. However, scholars have documented numerous biases and inaccuracies in search outputs. To improve the quality of search results,…
To promote engagement, recommendation algorithms on platforms like YouTube increasingly personalize users' feeds, limiting users' exposure to diverse content and depriving them of opportunities to reflect on their interests compared to…
Desktop browser extensions have long allowed users to improve their experience online and tackle widespread harms on websites. So far, no equivalent solution exists for mobile apps, despite the fact that individuals now spend significantly…
WebGL is a browser feature that enables JavaScript-based control of the graphics processing unit (GPU) to render interactive 3D and 2D graphics, without the use of plug-ins. Exploiting WebGL for attacks will affect billions of users since…
Millions of people rely on search functionality to find and explore content on entertainment platforms. Modern search systems use a combination of candidate generation and ranking approaches, with advanced methods leveraging deep learning…
Video content with fast luminance variations, or with spatial patterns of high contrast - referred to as epileptogenic visual content - may induce seizures on viewers with photosensitive epilepsy, and even cause discomfort in users not…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
The internet is a major distribution platform for web applications, but there are no effective transparency and audit mechanisms in place for the web. Due to the ephemeral nature of web applications, a client visiting a website has no…
User demand for blocking advertising and tracking online is large and growing. Existing tools, both deployed and described in research, have proven useful, but lack either the completeness or robustness needed for a general solution.…
Phishing is the combination of social engineering and technical exploits designed to convince a victim to provide personal information, usually for the monetary gain of the attacker. Phishing has become the most popular practice among the…
In the information age we are living in today, not only are we interested in accessing multimedia objects such as documents, videos, etc. but also in searching for professional experts, people or celebrities, possibly for professional needs…
Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information…
Video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc. provide a platform for media content sharing among its users. Some of these videos are copyright protected and restricted from being downloaded and saved. But users can…
How did we get from a world where cookies were something you ate and where "non-techies" were unaware of "Netscape cookies" to a world where cookies are a hot-button privacy issue for many computer users? This paper will describe how HTTP…
Web browsers provide the security foundation for our online experiences. Significant research has been done into the security of browsers themselves, but relatively little investigation has been done into how they interact with the…