Personalizing search via automated analysis of interests and activities
Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Privacy-enhancing personalized web search
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
Visualizing differences in web search algorithms using the expected weighted hoeffding distance
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
Anonymizing user profiles for personalized web search
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
Personalizing web search using long term browsing history
Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
When are users comfortable sharing locations with advertisers?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Smart, useful, scary, creepy: perceptions of online behavioral advertising
Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
Do not embarrass: re-examining user concerns for online tracking and advertising
Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
Contemporary search engines use a variety of techniques to personalize search results based on users' past queries. While studies have found that users generally prefer personalized search results to non-personalized ones, recent surveys also indicate growing reservations with respect to personalization because of its privacy implications. In this paper, we take a deeper look at privacy considerations of users during web search and explore how users' preferences for privacy and personalization interact when undertaking this activity. We conduct an empirical study over Google search, involving 25 participants in India and their respective web search histories. Our finding is that users exhibit a slight preference for personalization in their search results but are usually willing to "give up" personalization when searching for topics they deem sensitive. We discuss implications of these results for the design of privacy-preserving tools for web search.