Related papers: On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Request…
The enormous development of the Internet, both in the geographical scale and in the area of using its possibilities in everyday life, determines the creation and collection of huge amounts of data. Due to the scale, it is not possible to…
Most online services (Google, Facebook etc.) operate by providing a service to users for free, and in return they collect and monetize personal information (PI) of the users. This operational model is inherently economic, as the "good"…
The physical environment you navigate strongly determines which communities and people matter most to individuals. These effects drive both personal access to opportunities and the social capital of communities, and can often be observed in…
In the nascent days of e-content delivery, having a superior product was enough to give companies an edge against the competition. With today's fiercely competitive market, one needs to be multiple steps ahead, especially when it comes to…
Clickstreams on individual websites have been studied for decades to gain insights into user interests and to improve website experiences. This paper proposes and examines a novel sequence modeling approach for web clickstreams, that also…
The World Wide Web is fast becoming a source of information for a large part of the world's population. Because of its sheer size and complexity users often resort to recommendations from others to decide which sites to visit. We present a…
Sponsored search is an indispensable business model and a major revenue contributor of almost all the search engines. From the advertisers' side, participating in ranking the search results by paying for the sponsored search advertisement…
Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party…
Ad targeting is getting more powerful with introduction of new tools, such as Custom Audiences, behavioral targeting, and Audience Insights. Although this is beneficial for businesses as it enables people to receive more relevant…
The web is the prominent way information is exchanged in the 21st century. However, ensuring web-based information is accessible is complicated, particularly with web applications that rely on JavaScript and other technologies to deliver…
Understanding user behavior is essential to personalize and enrich a user's online experience. While there are significant benefits to be accrued from the pursuit of personalized services based on a fine-grained behavioral analysis, care…
Digital traces of our lives are now constantly produced by various connected devices, internet services and interactions. Our actions result in a multitude of heterogeneous data objects, or traces, kept in various locations in the cloud or…
User preference modeling is a vital yet challenging problem in personalized product search. In recent years, latent space based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance by jointly learning semantic representations of products,…
Online user reviews describing various products and services are now abundant on the web. While the information conveyed through review texts and ratings is easily comprehensible, there is a wealth of hidden information in them that is not…
We consider situations where consumers are aware that a statistical model determines the price of a product based on their observed behavior. Using a novel experiment varying the context similarity between participant data and a product, we…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
In this work, we model the end-to-end pipeline of the advertising ecosystem, allowing us to identify two main issues with the current trajectory of private advertising proposals. First, prior work has largely considered ad targeting and…
In the last decade new ways of shopping online have increased the possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant in the decision making of the consumer…
Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…