Fighting Online Click-Fraud Using Bluff Ads

Online advertising is currently the greatest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of specialized websites and modern profiling techniques, have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and even individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses. In this note we wish to raise the awareness of the networking research community on potential research areas within this emerging field. As an example strategy, we present Bluff ads; a class of ads that join forces in order to increase the effort level for click-fraud spammers. Bluff ads are either targeted ads, with irrelevant display text, or highly relevant display text, with irrelevant targeting information. They act as a litmus test for the legitimacy of the individual clicking on the ads. Together with standard threshold-based methods, fake ads help to decrease click-fraud levels.Comment: Draf

Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by advertising being the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal concern for us, the subjects of this process. This can cause many harms: privacy infringement, personal and professional embarrassment, restricted access to labour markets, restricted access to highest value pricing, and many others. There is a critical need to provide technologies that enable alternative practices, so that individuals can par- ticipate in the collection, management and consumption of their personal data. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that col- lates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to re- cover control of our online lives. We hope the Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data.Work supported in part by the EU FP7UCN project, grant agreement no 611001

Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

We are in a ‘personal data gold rush’ driven by advertising being the primary revenue source for most online companies. These companies accumulate extensive personal data about individuals with minimal concern for us, the subjects of this process. This can cause many harms: privacy infringement, personal and professional embarrassment, restricted access to labour markets, restricted access to highest value pricing, and many others. There is a critical need to provide technologies that enable alternative practices, so that individuals can par- ticipate in the collection, management and consumption of their personal data. In this paper we discuss the Databox, a personal networked device (and associated services) that col- lates and mediates access to personal data, allowing us to re- cover control of our online lives. We hope the Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data.

TRAP: using TaRgeted Ads to unveil Google personal Profiles

In the last decade, the advertisement market spread significantly in the web and mobile app system. Its effectiveness is also due thanks to the possibility to target the advertisement on the specific interests of the actual user, other than on the content of the website hosting the advertisement. In this scenario, became of great value services that collect and hence can provide information about the browsing user, like Facebook and Google. In this paper, we show how to maliciously exploit the Google Targeted Advertising system to infer personal information in Google user profiles. In particular, the attack we consider is external from Google and relies on combining data from Google AdWords with other data collected from a website of the Google Display Network. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack, also discussing possible application scenarios. The result of our research shows a significant practical privacy issue behind such type of targeted advertising service, and call for further investigation and the design of more privacy-aware solutions, possibly without impeding ?the current business model involved in online advertisement.

Modelo conceptual para el despliegue de publicidad ubicua soportado en un esquema de cooperación Smart TV- SmartPhone.

Advertising has been one of the most valuable marketing tools for years by means of a massive, wide-ranging and vertical approach between customers and advertisers. However, a new tendency known as pervasive advertising suggests an evolution of the classical concept towards a more interactive, customized, and horizontal environment that seeks to improve the impact and efficiency of conventional advertising. As a result of the support of emerging technologies related to the development of smartphones and smart TVs, there are no doubts about pervasive advertising potential and its value as a rich research field. This article introduces a conceptual model, which compiles the most relevant research areas related to pervasive computing applied to advertising supported on a smart TV – smartphone cooperation framework.La publicidad ha sido durante años una de las herramientas más valiosas del mercadeo a través de un enfoque principalmente masivo, generalizado y vertical entre clientes y anunciantes. No obstante, una nueva corriente conocida como publicidad ubicua marca una evolución en el concepto clásico hacia entornos más interactivos, personalizados y horizontales que busca mejorar la eficiencia y el impacto de la publicidad convencional. Gracias al apoyo de tecnologías emergentes que se sustentan en la evolución de los smartphones y los smart TV, el potencial de la publicidad ubicua es indudable, lo cual la ha convertido en un terreno fértil de investigación. El presente artículo presenta un modelo conceptual que condensa las áreas de investigación más relevantes relacionadas con el despliegue de publicidad en entornos de computación ubicua soportados en esquemas de cooperación smart TV – smartphone

Human-data interaction

We have moved from a world where computing is siloed and specialised, to a world where computing is ubiquitous and everyday. In many, if not most, parts of the world, networked computing is now mundane as both foreground (e.g., smartphones, tablets) and background (e.g., road tra c management, financial systems) technologies. This has permitted, and continues to permit, new gloss on existing interactions (e.g., online banking) as well as distinctively new interactions (e.g., massively scalable distributed real-time mobile gaming). An e ect of this increasing pervasiveness of networked computation in our environments and our lives is that data are also now ubiquitous: in many places, much of society is rapidly becoming “data driven”