Professor Balaji of Wharton operations and information management and Catherine Yang, a professor at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis recently released a report titled “Clickprints on the Web: Are There Signatures in Web Browsing Data?”
Padmanabhan and Yang find that each individual may have a “clickprint” — a unique pattern of web surfing behavior based on actions such as the number of pages viewed per session, the number of minutes spent on each web page, the time or day of the week the page is visited, and so on. The authors conclude that by observing these patterns, an e-commerce company can distinguish between two individuals with nearly 100% accuracy.
Padmanabhan and Yang found that it takes anywhere from 3 to 16 Internet sessions to identify the behavior of a unique individual. “The paper is really a proof of concept that behavior and minimal information can be used to ID users,” says Yang.
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