Protecting past and future choices: Identifying and evaluating functional vulnerabilities in recommender systems

Metoui, Nadia; Makhortykh, Mykola (24 June 2019). Protecting past and future choices: Identifying and evaluating functional vulnerabilities in recommender systems (Unpublished). In: Connected Life 2019: Data & Disorder. Oxford & London, UK. 24.06.-25.06.2019.

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Today, our societies are challenged by the abundance of choices. To help consumers choose, companies increasingly use AI-based recommender systems (RSs), learning from consumers’ behavior and suggesting items which are most likely to interest them. By doing so, RSs personalize companies’ offers and increase consumers’ engagement with brands as well.

Despite their importance for the digital economy, the growing deployment of RSs raises multiple concerns related to consumers’ rights, for instance, the threats of manipulation and discrimination. However, the majority of research was devoted to investigating the causes and effects of “accidental” negative effects of RSs caused by data/system biases.

By contrast, we emphasize the importance of studying how RS processes can be abused by third-party adversaries to serve malicious agendas. Specifically, we argue that it is crucial to ensure the functional integrity of RSs against these adversaries to protect consumers and provide efficient, trustworthy, and ethical services.

For this purpose, we propose to develop a novel framework to identify and evaluate functional vulnerabilities in different RSs, based on the likelihood of malicious exploitation(s) of a given vulnerability (i.e., attacks on RSs) and the consequential damages to the RS integrity and repercussions on RSs users (e.g., reputation damage, deception).

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB)
UniBE Contributor:	Makhortykh, Mykola
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology 000 Computer science, knowledge & systems 000 Computer science, knowledge & systems > 070 News media, journalism & publishing 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 360 Social problems & social services
Language:	English
Submitter:	Mykola Makhortykh
Date Deposited:	30 Jul 2019 09:11
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:29
Uncontrolled Keywords:	algorithms security recommender systems adversarial attacks
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/131654