Personalization, Privacy, and Me

TL;DR

This paper investigates user perspectives on privacy and personalization in news recommendation systems through a survey, emphasizing the need to balance personalization benefits with privacy safeguards.

Contribution

It provides insights into user privacy concerns across age groups and offers guidance for designing privacy-aware, human-centered news recommender algorithms.

Findings

Users are increasingly concerned about data collection.

Different age groups have varying privacy expectations.

Recommendations should balance personalization with privacy protection.

Abstract

News recommendation and personalization is not a solved problem. People are growing concerned of their data being collected in excess in the name of personalization and the usage of it for purposes other than the ones they would think reasonable. Our experience in building personalization products for publishers while adhering to safeguard user privacy led us to investigate more on the user perspective of privacy and personalization. We conducted a survey to explore people's experience with personalization and privacy and the viewpoints of different age groups. In this paper, we share our major findings with publishers and the community that can inform algorithmic design and implementation of the next generation of news recommender systems, which must put the human at its core and reach a balance between personalization experiences and privacy to reap the benefits of both.