Wibaf: a Within Browser Adaptation Framework That Enables Control Over Privacy
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WiBAF: a within browser adaptation framework that enables control over privacy Citation for published version (APA): Montes Garcia, A. (2017). WiBAF: a within browser adaptation framework that enables control over privacy. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. Document status and date: Published: 08/11/2017 Document Version: Publisher’s PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers) Please check the document version of this publication: • A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. 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If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement: www.tue.nl/taverne Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at: [email protected] providing details and we will investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 WiBAF: A Within Browser Adaptation Framework that Enables Control over Privacy Alejandro Montes García Copyright © 2017 by Alejandro Montes García. All Rights Reserved. CIP-DATA LIBRARY TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT EINDHOVEN Montes García, A. WiBAF: A Within Browser Adaptation Framework that Enables Con- trol over Privacy by Alejandro Montes García. Eindhoven: Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, 2017. Proefschrift. A catalogue record is available from the Eindhoven University of Technology Library ISBN 978-90-386-4364-9 Keywords: adaptive web-based systems, personalization, privacy, web The work in this thesis has been sponsored by Adversitement B. V. SIKS Dissertation Series No. 2017-37 The research reported in this thesis has been carried out under the auspices of SIKS, the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems. Thesis template by Buijs, J. C. A. M. WiBAF: A Within Browser Adaptation Framework that Enables Control over Privacy PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, op gezag van de rector magnificus prof.dr.ir. F.P.T.Baaijens, voor een commissie aangewezen door het College voor Promoties, in het openbaar te verdedigen op 08 november 2017 om 16:00 uur door Alejandro Montes García geboren te Oviedo, Spanje Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotoren en de samenstelling van de promotiecommissie is als volgt: voorzitter: prof.dr. J.J. Lukkien 1e promotor: prof.dr. P.M.E.De Bra 2e promotor: prof.dr. M. Pechenizkiy co-promotor: dr. G.H.L. Fletcher leden: prof.dr. M.P.Paule Ruíz (Universidad de Oviedo) prof.dr. H.C. Davis (University of Southampton) dr.ir. M.C. Willemsen dr. M. Fabri (Leeds Beckett University) Het onderzoek of ontwerp dat in dit proefschrift wordt beschreven is uitgevo- erd in overeenstemming met de TU/e Gedragscode Wetenschapsbeoefening. Acknowledgments I would like to start thanking the TU/e non-scientific staff, secretaries, clean- ers, janitors. It would have been impossible for me to complete this thesis without your work. I would also like to thank my supervisors Paul, Mykola and George, and all the other students, specially those who shared an office with me: Jianpeng, Rafael, Anil, Julia and Yongming. My friends have also been quite important during these four years, you have made my life in Eindhoven quite easy and enjoyable. Abstract This thesis deals with the trade-off between privacy and personalization in adaptive web-based systems. In order to do so, we suggest a browser based adaptation engine that allows the user to choose which portions of her user model will be stored on the client and which will be on the server, trading pri- vacy for personalization. More specifically, the architecture should contain tools to develop adaptive web-based applications that support user decisions in the privacy versus personalization trade-off. The thesis studies first whether this architecture is possible given the cur- rently available technology, what are the design challenges and what is the best way to overcome those challenges. These design challenges include (but are not limited to): • Which components the architecture should have and what their func- tions are? • How the authoring of adaptive applications should be done? What is given to authors and how can they extend the architecture? • What are the extra efforts that users should make in order to configure these new settings? Also, what new elements should be added to the set- tings interface, which is already loaded and confusing (in most cases)? Once we explain how these challenges have been overcome, we describe prac- tical use cases, including systems that are being used in production environ- ment but also small examples made to test the proper functioning of our ar- chitecture. viii Acknowledgments Finally, we deal with the social aspects that this research puts on the table. We try to find whether there is any correlation between the privacy concerns that users report and their behavior in a system in which they can make de- cisions. Also, we can see what happens when they are given feedback about their past decisions and how this affects what the system knows about them. Contents Acknowledgments v Abstract vii List of Figures xiii List of Tables xv 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation, Background and History . 3 1.1.1 Adaptive Web Based Systems . 3 1.1.2 Privacy and Control . 3 1.1.3 Trade-off between Privacy and Personalization . 5 1.1.4 The WiBAF Library . 6 1.2 Research Questions . 6 1.3 Outline of the Dissertation . 8 2 Related Work 11 2.1 Adaptive Web Based Systems . 11 2.1.1 Hypermedia . 12 2.1.2 User Modeling . 14 2.1.3 Adaptive Hypermedia . 15 2.2 Privacy . 18 2.3 Privacy in Adaptive Web Based Systems . 19 x CONTENTS 2.3.1 Anonymization . 20 2.3.2 Obfuscation . 21 2.3.3 Client-side personalization . 21 2.3.4 Privacy Management in Adaptive Web Based Systems . 23 2.4 Modern Web Applications . 25 2.4.1 DimML . 26 2.5 Summary . 26 3 Architecture of WiBAF 29 3.1 Requirements, Challenges and Decisions . 30 3.1.1 Requirements . 30 3.1.2 Challenges . 32 3.1.3 Decisions . 32 3.2 Client-Side Architecture . 33 3.3 Server-Side Architecture . 34 3.3.1 Integration into WordPress . 34 3.4 User-Decision Supporting Architecture . 37 3.4.1 Client and Server Communication . 37 3.4.2 Data Format . 38 3.5 Technical Performance . 39 3.6 Extensibility of the architecture . 42 3.6.1 Client-side Architecture Extensibility . 42 3.6.2 Server-side Architecture Extensibility . 43 3.7 Summary . 44 4 Authoring Adaptive Web Based Systems with WiBAF 45 4.1 Authoring for the Client-side . 46 4.1.1 Adaptation Model . 47 4.1.2 User Model . 61 4.1.3 Domain Model . 63 4.2 Authoring for the Server-side . 64 4.2.1 Authoring with WordPress . 65 4.3 Evaluation . 68 4.4 Summary . 71 5 Practical Examples of the Use of WiBAF 73 5.1 Small applications . 74 5.1.1 The Milky Way . 74 5.1.2 Gift recommender . 76 CONTENTS xi 5.1.3 First year aid kit . 76 5.2 The Autism and Uni Project . 78 5.2.1 Specific needs of students within the autistic spectrum . 78 5.3 Summary . 84 6 Effects of the Privacy versus Personalization Trade-Off on User Be- havior 87 6.1 Usability . 88 6.2 Privacy in WiBAF - Experimental setup . 94 6.3 Privacy concerns . 95 6.4 Willingness to disclose data . 98 6.4.1 Regrets . 98 6.5 Trust . 99 6.6 Summary . 101 7 Conclusions and Future Work 103 7.1 Conclusions . 103 7.2 Future Work . 105 Bibliography 109 Summary 123 Curriculum Vitae 125 SIKS dissertations 127 List of Figures 1.1 Outline of the dissertation . 9 2.1 Taxonomy of adaptation techniques taken from [68] . 17 3.1 Components of the client side architecture . 35 3.2 Runtime by plugin in the adaptive version . 41 4.1 Interface example for a user with little knowledge of and no in- terest in a specific topic. 58 4.2 Interface example for a user with knowledge of and interest in a specific topic. 59 4.3 Interface example for a user in a specific context. 60 4.4 Creation of new custom fields. 66 4.5 Custom fields as shown on the dashboard . 67 4.6 WiBAF settings . 69 4.7 Difficulty to integrate the adaptation into the WordPress ac- cording to the students. 70 4.8 Difficulty to develop an adaptive educational web adaptation with our tool according to the students. 71 5.1 The Milky Way example.