Exploring Browsing Habits of Internauts

In this work we investigate the browsing habits of Internauts. We leverage a large dataset collected from more than 25,000 residential users, and characterize their browsing behavior over a period two weeks. We consider the websites they access to, and observe how and when they access them. We aim at verifying if it would be possible to build profiles of users to be used for instance to identify the same user in different time windows. Results show that the multitude of websites, the heterogeneity of habits, and the limited periodicity make the browsing habits of users unique, dramatically complicating the task of building any reliable profiling. Our results are preliminary, and we encourage the research community to run further experiments. Researchers interested in accessing the data used in this paper are invited to contact us.