Identifying users behind shared accounts in online streaming services

Online streaming services are prevalent. Major service providers, such as Netflix (for movies) and Spotify (for music), usually have a large customer base. More often than not, users may share an account. This has attracted increasing attention recently, as account sharing not only compromises the service provider's financial interests but also impairs the performance of recommendation systems and consequently the quality of service provided to the users. To address this issue, this paper focuses on the problem of user identification in shared accounts. Our goal is three-fold: (1) Given an account, along with its historical session logs, we identify a set of users who share such account; (2) Given a new session issued by an account, we find the corresponding user among the identified users of such account; (3) We aim to boost the performance of item recommendation by user identification. While the mapping between users and accounts is unknown, we propose an unsupervised learning-based framework, Session-based Heterogeneous graph Embedding for User Identification (SHE-UI), to differentiate and model the preferences of users in an account, and to group sessions by these users. In SHE-UI, a heterogeneous graph is constructed to represent items such as songs and their available metadata such as artists, genres, and albums. An item-based session embedding technique is proposed using a normalized random walk in the heterogeneous graph. Our experiments conducted on two large-scale music streaming datasets, Last.fm and KKBOX, show that SHE-UI not only accurately identifies users, but also significantly improves the performance of item recommendation over the state-of-the-art methods.