Online advertising: analysis of privacy threats and protection approaches

Online advertising, the pillar of the “free” content on the Web, has revolutionized the marketing business in recent years by creating a myriad of new opportunities for advertisers to reach potential customers. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure composed of a variety of intermediary entities and technologies whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded behind the scenes at an unprecedented rate. Despite the enormous value of online advertising, however, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prompt serious privacy concerns. This article surveys the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting technologies, and presents a thorough overview of the underlying privacy risks and the solutions that may mitigate them. We first analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising. In particular, we examine the main components of the advertising infrastructure in terms of tracking capabilities, data collection, aggregation level and privacy risk, and overview the tracking and data-sharing technologies employed by these components. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and compare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and impact on the Web.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Risk-aware dynamic reserve prices of programmatic guarantee in display advertising

Display advertising is one important online advertising type where banner advertisements (shortly ad) on websites are usually measured by how many times they are viewed by online users. There are two major channels to sell ad views. They can be auctioned off in real time or be directly sold through guaranteed contracts in advance. The former is also known as real-time bidding (RTB), in which media buyers come to a common marketplace to compete for a single ad view and this inventory will be allocated to a buyer in milliseconds by an auction model. Unlike RTB, buying and selling guaranteed contracts are not usually programmatic but through private negotiations as advertisers would like to customise their requests and purchase ad views in bulk. In this paper, we propose a simple model that facilitates the automation of direct sales. In our model, a media seller puts future ad views on sale and receives buy requests sequentially over time until the future delivery period. The seller maintains a hidden yet dynamically changing reserve price in order to decide whether to accept a buy request or not. The future supply and demand are assumed to be well estimated and static, and the model's revenue management is using inventory control theory where each computed reverse price is based on the updated supply and demand, and the unsold future ad views will be auctioned off in RTB to the meet the unfulfilled demand. The model has several desirable properties. First, it is not limited to the demand arrival assumption. Second, it will not affect the current equilibrium between RTB and direct sales as there are no posted guaranteed prices. Third, the model uses the expected revenue from RTB as a lower bound for inventory control and we show that a publisher can receive expected total revenue greater than or equal to those from only RTB if she uses the computed dynamic reserves prices for direct sales

OPTYMALIZACJA OFERT REKLAMOWYCH POPRZEZ UKIERUNKOWANIE W OPARCIU O SAMOUCZĄCĄ SIĘ BAZĘ DANYCH

The method of targeting advertising on Internet sites based on a structured self-learning database is considered. The database accumulates data on previously accepted requests to display ads from a closed auction, data on participation in the auction and the results of displaying ads – the presence of a click and product installation. The base is structured by streams with features – site, place, price. Each such structural stream has statistical properties that are much simpler compared to the general ad impression stream, which makes it possible to predict the effectiveness of advertising. The selection of bidding requests only promising in terms of the result allows to reduce the cost of displaying advertising.Rozważono metodę ukierunkowywania reklam w serwisach internetowych w oparciu o ustrukturyzowaną samouczącą się bazę danych. W bazie gromadzone są dane o wcześniej zaakceptowanych żądaniach wyświetlenia reklam z zamkniętej aukcji, dane o udziale w aukcji oraz o wynikach wyświetlania reklam – zarejestrowanie kliknięcia i instalacji produktu. Bazę tworzą strumienie z cechami – strona, miejsce, cena. Każdy taki strumień strukturalny ma właściwości statystyczne, które są znacznie prostsze w porównaniu do ogólnego strumienia wyświetleń reklamy, co pozwala przewidywać skuteczność reklamy. Selekcja tylko obiecujących pod względem wyniku zapytań ofertowych pozwala na obniżenie kosztów wyświetlania reklam