Understanding the personalization-privacy dilemma for search queries: A User Perspective

Numerous studies have documented the benefits of search personalization on the web, and contemporary search engines use a variety of techniques to personalize search results based on users' past search queries and browsing behavior. While users generally prefer personalized search results to non-personalized ones (often sub-consciously so), recent surveys also indicate growing reservations with respect to personalization because of its privacy implications. In this paper, we study the possibility of achieving the benefits of personalization in web search without compromising user privacy. Through a user study with 30 users, we aim to understand users' preferences towards personalization within the context of search queries which they deem as privacy-leaking. Our finding is that users when faced with a privacy-personalization dilemma, generally prefer privacy over personalization and seldom demand personalization on privacy-leaking queries. We discuss implications for privacy-preserving web search and propose a clean solution to the problem.