Web Personalization and Privacy Concerns

Maya Liu * COMS E6125 * Spring 2011

What is Web Personalization?

making web pages more relevant to individual users cookies, data logs, recommendation systems, etc

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Why Personalize?
Saves time and frustration

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Why Personalize?
Saves resources

Why Personalize?
boosts e-commerce sales

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Current Personalization Methods

Web-usage mining

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Current Recommendation Systems

Content-Based users and web sites are modeled as objects with attributes think database entries recs based on user history and attributes not useful when there are large amounts of unstructured data Case-Based an improvement over content-based system used in e-commerce eliminates unstructured data requires same fields for objects of the same type not good for objects with unstructured data potentially lack diversity in results

Privacy Concerns

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Privacy Survey, c.2000

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Challenges to Preserving Privacy

personal definitions of privacy differ regional, cultural, and background differences regional laws and regulations

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Current Privacy Solutions

Largest permissible dominator Region-specific versions Pseudonymous personalization

Current and Future Improvements

Pseudonymous Personalization must satisfy the following criteria: unidentifiable linkable for the personalized system but not third parties unobservable for third parties pseudonymous users AND servers

Current and Future Improvements

Client-side Personalization store personal data on client computers instead of servers server leaks pose less risks and potentially increases user willingness to provide personal data challenges aggregate data calculations recommendation software must be sent to clients, providing opportunities for reverse-engineering

Case Study: SUGGEST

2007, [3]

"Novel approach to implementing Web personalization as a single online module" uses "usage clusters" to represent sessions ranks page importance by order of visit from starting page relies on aggregate data to weed out outlier data constructs directed graph from data points and use for recommendations

Case Study: SUGGEST

2007, [3]

Pros: stores data in adjacency matrix, and can change its size and recommendation level based on constraints no personal data collected, and uses link information already provided on many websites Cons: restricted to page recommendations exploitable, similar to Google bombing

Future Research Directions

user anonymity passive data-gathering inferring preferences from aggregate data, not specific user's history

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Questions? Comments?

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Reference
[1] Alfred Kobsa, Privacy-enhanced web personalization, The adaptive web: methods and strategies of web personalization, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007 [2] Michael J. Pazzani , Daniel Billsus, Content-based recommendation systems, The adaptive web: methods and strategies of web personalization, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007 [3] Ranieri Baraglia , Fabrizio Silvestri, Dynamic personalization of web sites without user intervention, Communications of the ACM, v.50 n.2, p.63-67, February 2007 [4] Barry Smyth, Case-based recommendation, The adaptive web: methods and strategies of web personalization, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007 [5] Magdalini Eirinaki , Michalis Vazirgiannis, Web mining for web personalization, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), v.3 n.1, p.1-27, February 2003 [6] Bamshad Mobasher , Robert Cooley , Jaideep Srivastava, Automatic personalization based on Web usage mining, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.8, p.142-151, Aug. 2000 [7] Teltzrow, M. and Kobsa, A.: Impacts of User Privacy Preferences on Personalized Systems: a Comparative Study. In: Designing Personalized User Experiences for eCommerce, Karat, C.-M., Blom, J., and Karat, J., Eds. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers (2004) 315-332, DOI 10.1007/1-4020-2148-8_17.