Article on Mobile Tracking by Patrick Zerrer and Cornelius Puschmann from the DCID Lab

A new paper by Patrick Zerrer and Cornelius Puschmann from the DCID Lab together with ZeMKI members Philipp Krieter and Stephanie Geise investigates mobile keyword tracking as a privacy-friendly data source in mobile media research. Published in the UMAP Adjunct ’24 Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalisation, the study presents an innovative method for the continuous detection of keywords across all applications and media formats.

The presented method is based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract detailed content from mobile interactions and correlate it with system logs. A particular focus is on protecting user privacy through anonymised log files and whitelist-based keyword and topic tracking. The four-month research project with 25 participants generated an extensive data set of nine million data points. Qualitative interviews were conducted with eight participants to clarify data protection issues.

The conference paper entitled “Following Topics Across All Apps and Media Formats: Mobile Keyword Tracking as a Privacy-Friendly Data Source in Mobile Media Research” was published in “UMAP Adjunct ’24: Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalisation” in June 2024 and is freely accessible under the following DOI: 10.1145/3631700.3664879