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Human behavior is difficult to observe continuously at scale, yet it leaves measurable traces in everyday device use. We test whether encrypted smartphone network traffic -- a ubiquitous, always-on, passive sensing modality -- can passively…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
Drug use by people is on the rise and is of great interest to public health agencies and law enforcement agencies. As found by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20 million Americans aged 12 years or older consumed illicit drugs in…
This paper investigates the usage patterns of Facebook among different demographics in the United States, focusing on the consumption of political information and its variability across age, gender, and ethnicity. Employing a novel data…
Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…
Population size estimates for hidden and hard-to-reach populations are particularly important when members are known to suffer from disproportion health issues or to pose health risks to the larger ambient population in which they are…
The World Wide Web is the most wide known information source that is easily available and searchable. It consists of billions of interconnected documents Web pages are authored by millions of people. Accesses made by various users to pages…
Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the…
Studies using massive, passively data collected from communication technologies have revealed many ubiquitous aspects of social networks, helping us understand and model social media, information diffusion, and organizational dynamics. More…
Improvements in the area of large language models have shifted towards the construction of models capable of using external tools and interpreting their outputs. These so-called web agents have the ability to interact autonomously with the…
The Tor anonymity network is difficult to measure because, if not done carefully, measurements could risk the privacy (and potentially the safety) of the network's users. Recent work has proposed the use of differential privacy and secure…
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 web page usage mining plays a vital role in enriching the page's content and structure based on the feedbacks received from the user's interactions with the page. This paper proposes a model for micro-managing the tracking activities by…
We examine the extent of needless traffic exposure by the routing infrastructure to nations geographically irrelevant to packet transmission. We quantify what countries are geographically logical to observe on a network path traveling…
Subjective well-being is a cornerstone of individual and societal health, yet its scientific measurement has traditionally relied on self-report methods prone to recall bias and high participant burden. This has left a gap in our…
Web archive analytics is the exploitation of publicly accessible web pages and their evolution for research purposes -- to the extent organizationally possible for researchers. In order to better understand the complexity of this task, the…
Gender is an important demographic attribute of people. This paper provides a survey of human gender recognition in computer vision. A review of approaches exploiting information from face and whole body (either from a still image or gait…
In this study, we report on techniques and analyses that enable us to capture Internet-wide activity at individual IP address-level granularity by relying on server logs of a large commercial content delivery network (CDN) that serves close…
Existing constructs for privacy concerns and behaviors do not adequately model deviations between user attitudes and behaviors. Although a number of studies have examined supposed deviations from rationality by online users, true…
Wearable devices, or "wearables," bring great benefits but also potential risks that could expose users' activities with- out their awareness or consent. In this paper, we report findings from the first large-scale survey conducted to…