Related papers: TikTok's Research API: Problems Without Explanatio…
Public attention towards explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been rising in recent years to offer methodologies for human oversight. This has translated into the proliferation of research outputs, such as from…
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussions on the scholarly access to social media data, discussing a case where this access is barred despite its value for understanding and countering online disinformation and despite the absence…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
Integrating Google's Topics API into the digital advertising ecosystem represents a significant shift toward privacy-conscious advertising practices. This article analyses the implications of implementing Topics API on ad networks, focusing…
With the growth of user-generated content, we observe the constant rise of the number of companies, such as search engines, content aggregators, etc., that operate with tremendous amounts of web content not being the services hosting it.…
This paper documents our release of a large-scale data collection of TikTok posts related to the upcoming 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Our current data comprises 1.8 million videos published between November 1, 2023, and May 26, 2024.…
Understanding the behaviour of a system's API can be hard. Giving users access to relevant examples of how an API behaves has been shown to make this easier for them. In addition, such examples can be used to verify expected behaviour or…
For almost 20 years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been publishing statistics about how many people visited each Wikipedia page on each day. This data helps Wikipedia editors determine where to focus their efforts to improve the online…
The advent of social media transformed interpersonal communication and information consumption processes. This digital landscape accommodates user intentions, also resulting in an increase of offensive language and harmful behavior.…
Micro-video popularity prediction (MVPP) forecasts the popularity a newly uploaded short-form video will attract within a fixed number of days after upload. This task supports downstream applications in recommendation, advertising, and…
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…
Developers rely on third-party library Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) when developing software. However, libraries typically come with assumptions and API usage constraints, whose violation results in API misuse. API misuses may…
What does the Digital Services Act (DSA) mean for online advertising? We describe and analyse the DSA rules that are most relevant for online advertising and adtech (advertising technology). We also highlight to what extent the DSA's…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to go beyond simple factual queries toward Deep Research-tasks that require decomposing questions into sub-problems, coordinating multi-step reasoning, and synthesizing evidence from…
Mobile application developers are required to disclose how they collect, use, and share user data in compliance with privacy regulations. To support transparency, major app marketplaces have introduced standardized disclosure mechanisms. In…
Online platforms have enacted various policies to maintain a safe and trustworthy advertising environment. However, the extent to which these policies are adhered to and enforced remains a subject of interest and concern. In this work, we…
Analytics on personal data, such as individuals' mobility, financial, and health data can be of significant benefit to society. Such data is already collected by smartphones, apps and services today, but liberal societies have so far…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool learning. In real-world scenarios, user queries are often ambiguous and incomplete, requiring effective clarification. However, existing interactive…
With the advancement in personal smart devices and pervasive network connectivity, users are no longer passive content consumers, but also contributors in producing new contents. This expansion in live services requires a detailed analysis…