Related papers: Why am I seeing this: Democratizing End User Audit…
Recommender systems are essential for personalizing digital experiences on e-commerce sites, streaming services, and social media platforms. While these systems are necessary for modern digital interactions, they face fairness, bias,…
Social media platforms moderate content for each user by incorporating the outputs of both platform-wide content moderation systems and, in some cases, user-configured personal moderation preferences. However, it is unclear (1) how end…
Algorithm audits are powerful tools for studying black-box systems. While very effective in examining technical components, the method stops short of a sociotechnical frame, which would also consider users as an integral and dynamic part of…
Personalization is pervasive in the online space as, when combined with learning, it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that such…
Recommender systems are facing scrutiny because of their growing impact on the opportunities we have access to. Current audits for fairness are limited to coarse-grained parity assessments at the level of sensitive groups. We propose to…
As algorithms increasingly shape user experiences on personalized recommendation platforms, there is a growing need for tools that empower end users to audit these algorithms for potential bias and harms. This paper introduces a novel…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
With the prevalence of deep learning based embedding approaches, recommender systems have become a proven and indispensable tool in various information filtering applications. However, many of them remain difficult to diagnose what aspects…
Using personalized explanations to support recommendations has been shown to increase trust and perceived quality. However, to actually obtain better recommendations, there needs to be a means for users to modify the recommendation criteria…
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…
Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life, serving as a primary source of news and information for many users. These platforms increasingly rely on personalised recommendation systems that shape what users see and…
Despite the common use of rule-based tools for online content moderation, human moderators still spend a lot of time monitoring them to ensure that they work as intended. Based on surveys and interviews with Reddit moderators who use…
As e-commerce rapidly integrates artificial intelligence for content creation and product recommendations, these technologies offer significant benefits in personalization and efficiency. AI-driven systems automate product descriptions,…
Personal data collected at scale promises to improve decision-making and accelerate innovation. However, sharing and using such data raises serious privacy concerns. A promising solution is to produce synthetic data, artificial records to…
Online social networks have enabled new methods and modalities of collaboration and sharing. These advances bring privacy concerns: online social data is more accessible and persistent and simultaneously less contextualized than traditional…
Smart recommendation algorithms have revolutionized content delivery and improved efficiency across various domains. However, concerns about user agency arise from the algorithms' inherent opacity (information asymmetry) and one-way output…
In this work, we introduce a novel metric for auditing group fairness in ranked lists. Our approach offers two benefits compared to the state of the art. First, we offer a blueprint for modeling of user attention. Rather than assuming a…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
Online services routinely mine user data to predict user preferences, make recommendations, and place targeted ads. Recent research has demonstrated that several private user attributes (such as political affiliation, sexual orientation,…
News recommendation and personalization is not a solved problem. People are growing concerned of their data being collected in excess in the name of personalization and the usage of it for purposes other than the ones they would think…