The identification of unique clickprints in web browsing data

Knowledge Wharton publishes this week this article Does Your Web Browsing Create a Unique 'Clickprint'? based in a new research paper "Balaji Padmanabhan and Catherine Yang about how identify some of the web users.


"We address the question of whether humans have unique signatures - or clickprints - when they browse the Web. The importance of being able to answer this can be significant given applications to electronic commerce in general and in particular online fraud detection, a major problem in electronic commerce costing the economy billions of dollars annually. In this paper we present a data mining approach to answer this “unique clickprint determination problem.

The solution technique is based on a simple yet powerful idea of casting this problem as an aggregation problem. We develop formal methods to solve this problem and thereby determine the optimal amount of user data that must be aggregated before unique clickprints can be deemed to exist. Using some basic behavioral variables derived from real Web browsing data, our results suggest that the answer to the main question is “most likely”, given that we observe reasonably accurate user predictions using limited data."
“Paper Abstract
“Clickprints on the Web: Are there signatures in Web browsing data?”
By Balaji Padmanabhan and Catherine Yang