Related papers: Distortion Search, A Web Search Privacy Heuristic
Modern search engines extensively personalize results by building detailed user profiles based on query history and behaviour. While personalization can enhance relevance, it introduces privacy risks and can lead to filter bubbles. This…
Data mining services require accurate input data for their results to be meaningful, but privacy concerns may influence users to provide spurious information. To encourage users to provide correct inputs, we recently proposed a data…
Our ability to control the flow of sensitive personal information to online systems is key to trust in personal privacy on the internet. We ask how to detect, assess and defend user privacy in the face of search engine personalisation? We…
We propose a method to protect the privacy of search engine users by decomposing the queries using semantically \emph{related} and unrelated \emph{distractor} terms. Instead of a single query, the search engine receives multiple decomposed…
Web query log data contain information useful to research; however, release of such data can re-identify the search engine users issuing the queries. These privacy concerns go far beyond removing explicitly identifying information such as…
Search engine companies collect the "database of intentions", the histories of their users' search queries. These search logs are a gold mine for researchers. Search engine companies, however, are wary of publishing search logs in order not…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Vast amounts of information of all types are collected daily about people by governments, corporations and individuals. The information is collected when users register to or use on-line applications, receive health related services, use…
Profiling users for the purpose of targeted advertisements or other kinds of personalization is very popular on the internet. But besides the benefits of individually tailored news feeds and shopping recommendation research has shown that…
Releasing Web query logs which contain valuable information for research or marketing, can breach the privacy of search engine users. Therefore rendering query logs to limit linking a query to an individual while preserving the data…
Ensuring the effectiveness of search queries while protecting user privacy remains an open issue. When an Information Retrieval System (IRS) does not protect the privacy of its users, sensitive information may be disclosed through the…
In this work, we focus on protection against identity disclosure in the publication of sparse multidimensional data. Existing multidimensional anonymization techniquesa) protect the privacy of users either by altering the set of…
The overturning of the Internet Privacy Rules by the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) in late March 2017 allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to collect, share and sell their customers' Web browsing data without their consent.…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
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…
Web search is an integral part of our daily lives. Recently, there has been a trend of personalization in Web search, where different users receive different results for the same search query. The increasing level of personalization is…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…