Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Mat Kelly reviews "A Personal Privacy Preserving Framework..." by Song et al. at SIGIR 2018.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            ⓖⓞⓖⓐⓣⓞⓡⓢ Americans are more open to share personal aspects on the Web than Asians. — Song et al. 2018 I recently read a paper published at SIGIR 2018 by Song et al. titled "A Personal Privacy Preserving Framework: I Let You Know Who Can See What" ( PDF ). The title alone captivated my interest with the above claim deep within the text. The authors' goal of the work was to reduce users' privacy risks on social networks by determining who could see what sort of information they posted. They did so by es

ISIS members immolating captured Jordanian pilot Web archives have been used for purposes other than digital preservation and browsing historical data. These purposes can be divided into three categories: Uploading content to web archives to ensure continuous availability of the data. Avoiding governments' censorship or websites' terms of service. Using URLs from web archives, instead of direct links, for news sites with opposing ideologies to avoid increasing their web traffic and deprive them of ad revenue. 1. Uploading content to web archives to ensure continuous availability of the data Web archives, by design, are intended to solve the problem of digital data preservation so people can access data when it is no longer available on the live web. In this paper,  Who and What Links to the Internet Archive , ( Yasmin AlNoamany , Ahmed AlSum , Michele C. Weigle , and Michael L. Nelson , 2013), the authors show that the percentage of the requested archived pag

Fig. 1 - Barack Obama's Twitter page in Urdu The  ODU   WSDL  lab has sporadically encountered archived Twitter pages for which the default HTML language setting was expected to be in English, but when retrieving the archived page its template appears in a foreign language. For example, the tweet content of Previous US President  Barack Obama ’s archived Twitter page , shown in the image above, is in English, but the page template is in  Urdu . You may notice that some of the information, such as, "followers", "following", "log in", etc. are not displayed in English but instead are displayed in Urdu. A similar observation was expressed by Justin Littman  in " The vulnerability in the US digital registry, Twitter, and the Internet Archive ". According to Justin's post, the Internet Archive is aware of the bug and is in the process of fixing it.  This problem may appear benign to the casual observer, but it has deep implications whe

The USA Gymnastics team shows significant growth during the years the Olympics are held. Due to Twitter's API, we have limited ability to collect historical data for a user's followers. The information for when one account starts following another is unavailable. Tracking the popularity of an account and how it grows cannot be done without that information. Another pitfall is when an account is deleted, Twitter does not provide data about the account after the deletion date. It is as if the account never existed. However, this information can be gathered from the Internet Archive . If the account is popular enough to be archived, then a follower count for a specific date can be collected.  The previous method to determine followers over time is to plot the users in the order the API returns them against their join dates. This works on the assumption that the Twitter API returns followers in the order they started following the account being observed. The creation