Related papers: Distortion Search, A Web Search Privacy Heuristic
Although there are privacy-enhancing tools designed to protect users' online privacy, it is surprising to see a lack of user-centric solutions allowing privacy control based on the joint assessment of privacy risks and benefits, due to data…
This paper aims at answering the following two questions in privacy-preserving data analysis and publishing: What formal privacy guarantee (if any) does $k$-anonymization provide? How to benefit from the adversary's uncertainty about the…
Product search is one of the most popular methods for people to discover and purchase products on e-commerce websites. Because personal preferences often have an important influence on the purchase decision of each customer, it is intuitive…
In spite of the legal advances in personal data protection, the issue of private data being misused by unauthorized entities is still of utmost importance. To prevent this, Privacy by Design is often proposed as a solution for data…
Users worldwide access massive amounts of curated data in the form of rankings on a daily basis. The societal impact of this ease of access has been studied and work has been done to propose and enforce various notions of fairness in…
Real-time, online-editing web apps provide free and convenient services for collaboratively editing, sharing and storing files. The benefits of these web applications do not come for free: not only do service providers have full access to…
Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share…
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…
As the modern world becomes increasingly digitized and interconnected, distributed signal processing has proven to be effective in processing its large volume of data. However, a main challenge limiting the broad use of distributed signal…
Search results personalization has become an effective way to improve the quality of search engines. Previous studies extracted information such as past clicks, user topical interests, query click entropy and so on to tailor the original…
Cloud computing has become a potential resource for businesses and individuals to outsource their data to remote but highly accessible servers. However, potentials of the cloud services have not been fully unleashed due to users' concerns…
Recently, privacy issues in web services that rely on users' personal data have raised great attention. Unlike existing privacy-preserving technologies such as federated learning and differential privacy, we explore another way to mitigate…
Giving user a simple and well organized web search result has been a topic of active information Retrieval (IR) research. Irrespective of how small or ambiguous a query is, a user always wants the desired result on the first display of an…
There are currently two approaches to anonymization: "utility first" (use an anonymization method with suitable utility features, then empirically evaluate the disclosure risk and, if necessary, reduce the risk by possibly sacrificing some…
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
There is a growing demand for transparency in search engines to understand how search results are curated and to enhance users' trust. Prior research has introduced search result explanations with a focus on how to explain, assuming…
Data mining information about people is becoming increasingly important in the data-driven society of the 21st century. Unfortunately, sometimes there are real-world considerations that conflict with the goals of data mining; sometimes the…
Websites with hyper-partisan, left or right-leaning focus offer content that is typically biased towards the expectations of their target audience. Such content often polarizes users, who are repeatedly primed to specific (extreme) content,…
A large amount of data on the WWW remains inaccessible to crawlers of Web search engines because it can only be exposed on demand as users fill out and submit forms. The Hidden web refers to the collection of Web data which can be accessed…