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How Do Home Computer Users Browse the Web?

Published: 28 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

With the ubiquity of web tracking, information on how people navigate the internet is abundantly collected yet, due to its proprietary nature, rarely distributed. As a result, our understanding of user browsing primarily derives from small-scale studies conducted more than a decade ago. To provide an broader updated perspective, we analyze data from 257 participants who consented to have their home computer and browsing behavior monitored through the Security Behavior Observatory. Compared to previous work, we find a substantial increase in tabbed browsing and demonstrate the need to include tab information for accurate web measurements. Our results confirm that user browsing is highly centralized, with 50% of internet use spent on 1% of visited websites. However, we also find that users spend a disproportionate amount of time on low-visited websites, areas with a greater likelihood of containing risky content. We then identify the primary gateways to these sites and discuss implications for future research.

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cover image ACM Transactions on the Web
ACM Transactions on the Web  Volume 16, Issue 1
February 2022
173 pages
ISSN:1559-1131
EISSN:1559-114X
DOI:10.1145/3484933
Issue’s Table of Contents
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 28 September 2021
Accepted: 01 June 2021
Revised: 01 June 2021
Received: 01 February 2021
Published in�TWEB�Volume 16, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Web browsing
  2. user behavior
  3. personal computers
  4. measurement

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  • Research-article
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

  • National Security Agency (NSA) Science of Security Lablet at Carnegie Mellon University
  • Carnegie Bosch Institute (CBI) Fellowship

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