Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Feigenbaum, Joan

Abstract

Providers of web services and content are compelled to offer value in order to attract users, but they are also increasingly incentivized to abuse their users in order to maximize revenue. Interfaces that monitor, distract, manipulate, and addict users are commonplace, and means of resistance are largely individualized and dependent on technical proficiency. This dissertation advocates a collective approach to empowering users in their relationship to the web services that they use, centered on an organizational form known as the data co-op. We describe two software systems that pair naturally with data co-ops and are designed to improve users’ control over various aspects of their use of web services. The Platform for Untrusted Resource Evaluation (PURE) helps users selectively direct their attention toward web resources with desirable properties. A label processing algorithm aggregates labels from various sources, establishing a confidence rating for whether a given attribute applies to a given URL. The client tool PURESearch uses PURE ratings to adjust the prominence of search results according to user preferences. The Platform for Content-Structure Inference (PCSI) gives users control over the interfaces they use to access existing web content. Scripts written in MOHAWK, an extension of AWK, describe the process of translating web pages into a format that exposes the structure of the content. PCSI applications then present the content in a new interface controlled by the user, as demonstrated in the news reader application PCSINews.

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