ABSTRACT
A user's online profile attempts to capture the essence of a user's interests, behaviors, and preferences as they manifest themselves online either in public or to an organization with access to the user's network activity. Profiling online user behavior and gleaning information about individual usage or habits is useful in identifying and confirming suspected cybercriminals. This has obvious utility for corporations and governments seeking to secure their systems but must be counterbalanced against privacy concerns that continue to pose a major challenge to the widespread acceptance of online profiling. This chapter surveys recent developments in online user profiling, including existing approaches, methods, research challenges, and potential applications of online user profiling. We discuss online behavioral models such as ones that model a user's mobile apps behavior as well as online interest models such as YouTube and Twitter behavior models. This discussion will be done with an eye toward data acquisition, feature extraction, profiling techniques, and privacy challenges.
