Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference

Perceptions of value: an analysis of New Jersey\u27s public and private four-year colleges and universities to determine if adherence to recognized design principles increases the perceived value of their institution

The purpose of this study was to determine how closely four-year New Jersey colleges and universities, both public and private, adhere to general standards for home page layout and design. This study also looked to determine if adherence to proper design standards increase the perceived quality of the institution. Field experiment participants rated the home pages of six institutions chosen by the researcher in her content analysis. Using Likert-type questions, 23 students rated the home pages of the colleges and universities, yielding results supporting the initial claim: the more closely an institution adheres to certain home page design standards, the more highly qualified it will be perceived

Local Style Awareness of Font Images

When we compare fonts, we often pay attention to styles of local parts, such as serifs and curvatures. This paper proposes an attention mechanism to find important local parts. The local parts with larger attention are then considered important. The proposed mechanism can be trained in a quasi-self-supervised manner that requires no manual annotation other than knowing that a set of character images is from the same font, such as Helvetica. After confirming that the trained attention mechanism can find style-relevant local parts, we utilize the resulting attention for local style-aware font generation. Specifically, we design a new reconstruction loss function to put more weight on the local parts with larger attention for generating character images with more accurate style realization. This loss function has the merit of applicability to various font generation models. Our experimental results show that the proposed loss function improves the quality of generated character images by several few-shot font generation models.Comment: Accepted at ICDAR WML 202

A survey on web tracking: mechanisms, implications, and defenses

Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Most web services make continuous efforts to track their users and to obtain as much personal information as they can from the things they search, the sites they visit, the people they contact, and the products they buy. This information is mostly used for commercial purposes, which go far beyond targeted advertising. Although many users are already aware of the privacy risks involved in the use of internet services, the particular methods and technologies used for tracking them are much less known. In this survey, we review the existing literature on the methods used by web services to track the users online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. We present five main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, and other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users. For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Some of them are specific to a particular tracking approach, while others are more universal (block more than one threat). Finally, we present the future trends in user tracking and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Visualizing Music Collections Based on Metadata: Concepts, User Studies and Design Implications

Modern digital music services and applications enable easy access to vast online and local music collections. To differentiate from their competitors, software developers should aim to design novel, interesting, entertaining, and easy-to-use user interfaces (UIs) and interaction methods for accessing the music collections. One potential approach is to replace or complement the textual lists with static, dynamic, adaptive, and/or interactive visualizations of selected musical attributes. A well-designed visualization has the potential to make interaction with a service or an application an entertaining and intuitive experience, and it can also improve the usability and efficiency of the system. This doctoral thesis belongs to the intersection of the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), music information retrieval (MIR), and information visualization (Infovis). HCI studies the design, implementation and evaluation of interactive computing systems; MIR focuses on the different strategies for helping users seek music or music-related information; and Infovis studies the use of visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. The purpose of the thesis is to explore the feasibility of visualizing music collections based on three types of musical metadata: musical genre, tempo, and the release year of the music. More specifically, the research goal is to study which visual variables and structures are best suitable for representing the metadata, and how the visualizations can be used in the design of novel UIs for music player applications, including music recommendation systems. The research takes a user- centered and constructive design-science approach, and covers all the different aspects of interaction design: understanding the users, the prototype design, and the evaluation. The performance of the different visualizations from the user perspective was studied in a series of online surveys with 51-104 (mostly Finnish) participants. In addition to tempo and release year, five different visualization methods (colors, icons, fonts, emoticons and avatars) for representing musical genres were investigated. Based on the results, promising ways to represent tempo include the number of objects, shapes with a varying number of corners, and y-axis location combined with some other visual variable or clear labeling. Promising ways to represent the release year include lightness and the perceived location on the z- or x-axis. In the case of genres, the most successful method was the avatars, which used elements from the other methods and required the most screen estate. In the second part of the thesis, three interactive prototype applications (avatars, potentiometers and a virtual world) focusing on visualizing musical genres were designed and evaluated with 40-41 Finnish participants. While the concepts had great potential for complementing traditional text-based music applications, they were too simple and restricted to replace them in longer-term use. Especially the lack of textual search functionality was seen as a major shortcoming. Based on the results of the thesis, it is possible to design recognizable, acceptable, entertaining, and easy-to-use (especially genre) visualizations with certain limitations. Important factors include, e.g., the used metadata vocabulary (e.g., set of musical genres) and visual variables/structures; preferred music discovery mode; available screen estate; and the target culture of the visualizations

How Favourable Attitudes are Formed when the Semantic Associations of a Logotype are Congruent with Brand Personality

This thesis explores how favourable attitudes are formed when the semantic associations of a logotype are congruent with brand personality. By analysing the attitude response to varying brands sets, the findings from this thesis indicate that congruency within the underlying connotations of the logotype and brand personality did in fact produce positive responses in both attitude and aesthetics. Through the congruency research in this thesis, several influential factors affecting the attitude formation process towards a brand have been found. These factors include varying degrees of font appropriateness effectiveness, the over-powering effect of semantic associations and how underlying consumer behaviour tendencies affect purchasing decisions. The methodology for this project drew on two surveys completed by approximately 200 participants. Two logotypes and two brand slogans are cross-paired with each other resulting in four "brand" variants containing congruent and incongruent brand elements. Findings from this thesis emphasise the importance of underlying semantic associations in typography, as well as bringing a fresh perspective for graphic designers, typographers and type designers to assist their future work with successful logotype design

Runtime Automated Detection of Out of Process Resource Management in the X Windowing System

Software applications typically allocate and deallocate resources during their lifetime. Resources can be categorized into two broad groups, in-process and out-of-process resources where in-process resources are local resources directly managed by a client, while out-of-process resources are remotely managed by a client which instructs a server to allocate and deallocate the resource on its behalf. Out-of-process resources do not reside in a clients address space which poses an extra layer of complexity in attempting to debug their misuse. This thesis presents an automatic run-time solution to the problem of detecting and reporting source code locations of application client mismanagement of out-of-process resources for a specific case-study of the X Windowing System which lends itself to use in the wider general case