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

Digital Advertising and News: Who Advertises on News Sites and How Much Those Ads Are Targeted

Analyzes trends in advertising in twenty-two news operations, including shifts to digital advertising, use of consumer data to target ads, types of ads, and industries represented among advertisers by media type

On web user tracking of browsing patterns for personalised advertising

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems on 19/02/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17445760.2017.1282480On today’s Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. App and service providers want to know everything they can about their users, in order to improve their product experience. Also, advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users’ actions and tastes to suggest a range of products to buy. Both service providers and advertisers try to track users’ behaviour across their product network. For application providers this means tracking users’ actions within their platform. For third-party services following users, means being able to track them across different websites and applications. It is well known how, while surfing the Web, users leave traces regarding their identity in the form of activity patterns and unstructured data. These data constitute what is called the user’s online footprint. We analyse how advertising networks build and collect users footprints and how the suggested advertising reacts to changes in the user behaviour.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On Web User Tracking: How Third-Party Http Requests Track Users' Browsing Patterns for Personalised Advertising

On today's Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. Advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users' actions and tastes to suggest a range of products to buy. It follows that, while surfing the Web users leave traces regarding their identity in the form of activity patterns and unstructured data. We analyse how advertising networks build user footprints and how the suggested advertising reacts to changes in the user behaviour.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1605.0653

Human-centred identity - from rhetoric to reality

This paper presents a proposal for human-centred identity management. Even though the term ‘human-centred identity’ has been widely used in the past few years, the solutions either descritbe a technical system for managing identity, or describe an identity management solution that meets a particular administrative need. Our proposal, however, presents a set of propertis that have to be considered, and the choices have to be made for each property must satisfy the needs of both the individual and the organization that owns the identity management system. The properties were identified as a result of reviewing a range of national identity systems, and the problems that arise from them