Related papers: On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Request…
Information personalization is fertile ground for application of AI techniques. In this article I relate personalization to the ability to capture partial information in an information-seeking interaction. The specific focus is on…
Online services such as web search and e-commerce applications typically rely on the collection of data about users, including details of their activities on the web. Such personal data is used to enhance the quality of service via…
Most modern recommendation algorithms are data-driven: they generate personalized recommendations by observing users' past behaviors. A common assumption in recommendation is that how a user interacts with a piece of content (e.g., whether…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological…
Different advertising messages work for different people. Machine learning can be an effective way to personalise climate communications. In this paper we use machine learning to reanalyse findings from a recent study, showing that online…
The ongoing deprecation of third-party cookies by web browser vendors has sparked the proposal of alternative methods to support more privacy-preserving personalized advertising on web browsers and applications. The Topics API is being…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
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…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
With the rapid development of applications in open distributed environments such as eCommerce, privacy of information is becoming a critical issue. Today, many online companies are gathering information and have assembled sophisticated…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
Popular social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram allow third-parties to run targeted advertising campaigns on sensitive attributes in-platform. These ads are interactive by default, meaning users can comment or ``react'' (e.g.,…
Human-machine networks affect many aspects of our lives: from sharing experiences with family and friends, knowledge creation and distance learning, and managing utility bills or providing feedback on retail items, to more specialised…
Recommender systems have become an integral part of many social networks and extract knowledge from a user's personal and sensitive data both explicitly, with the user's knowledge, and implicitly. This trend has created major privacy…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
The structure of network data enables simple predictive models to leverage local correlations between nodes to high accuracy on tasks such as attribute and link prediction. While this is useful for building better user models, it introduces…
Perceived responsiveness of a web page is one of the most important and least understood metrics of web page design, and is critical for attracting and maintaining a large audience. Web pages can be designed to meet performance SLAs early…
User identification has been a major field of research in privacy and security topics. Users might utilize multiple Online Social Networks (OSNs) to access a variety of text, videos, and links, and connect to their friends. Identifying user…
Manipulation defines many of our experiences as a consumer, including subtle nudges and overt advertising campaigns that seek to gain our attention and money. With the advent of digital services that can continuously optimize online…