Why am I seeing this: Democratizing End User Auditing for Online Content Recommendations
Chaoran Chen, Leyang Li, Luke Cao, Yanfang Ye, Tianshi Li, Yaxing Yao,, Toby Jia-jun Li

TL;DR
This paper introduces an interactive sandbox tool that enables users to test and understand how online recommendation algorithms respond to different user attributes, promoting transparency and accountability.
Contribution
It presents a novel interactive sandbox approach with synthetic personas to empower end users to audit personalized content recommendations.
Findings
User study shows high usability and usefulness
Effective in enabling end-user auditing
Improves understanding of recommendation systems
Abstract
Personalized recommendation systems tailor content based on user attributes, which are either provided or inferred from private data. Research suggests that users often hypothesize about reasons behind contents they encounter (e.g., "I see this jewelry ad because I am a woman"), but they lack the means to confirm these hypotheses due to the opaqueness of these systems. This hinders informed decision-making about privacy and system use and contributes to the lack of algorithmic accountability. To address these challenges, we introduce a new interactive sandbox approach. This approach creates sets of synthetic user personas and corresponding personal data that embody realistic variations in personal attributes, allowing users to test their hypotheses by observing how a website's algorithms respond to these personas. We tested the sandbox in the context of targeted advertisement. Our user…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsRecommender Systems and Techniques
