5,422 research outputs found
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
Efficient Location Privacy In Mobile Applications
Location awareness is an essential part of today\u27s mobile devices. It is a well-established technology that offers significant benefits to mobile users. While location awareness has triggered the exponential growth of mobile computing, it has also introduced new privacy threats due to frequent location disclosures. Movement patterns could be used to identify individuals and also leak sensitive information about them, such as health condition, lifestyle, political/religious affiliations, etc. In this dissertation we address location privacy in the context of mobile applications. First we look into location privacy in the context of Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technology. DSA is a promising framework for mitigating the spectrum shortage caused by fixed spectrum allocation policies. In particular, DSA allows license-exempt users to access the licensed spectrum bands when not in use by their respective owners. Here, we focus on the database-driven DSA model, where mobile users issue location-based queries to a white-space database in order to identify idle channels in their area. We present a number of efficient protocols that allow users to retrieve channel availability information from the white-space database while maintaining their location secret.
In the second part of the dissertation we look into location privacy in the context of location-aware mobile advertising. Location-aware mobile advertising is expanding very rapidly and is forecast to grow much faster than any other industry in the digital era. Unfortunately, with the rise and expansion of online behavioral advertising, consumers have grown very skeptical of the vast amount of data that is extracted and mined from advertisers today. As a result, the consensus has shifted towards stricter privacy requirements. Clearly, there exists an innate conflict between privacy and advertisement, yet existing advertising practices rely heavily on non-disclosure agreements and policy enforcement rather than computational privacy guarantees. In the second half of this dissertation, we present a novel privacy-preserving location-aware mobile advertisement framework that is built with privacy in mind from the ground up. The framework consists of several methods which ease the tension that exists between privacy and advertising by guaranteeing, through cryptographic constructions, that (i) mobile users receive advertisements relative to their location and interests in a privacy-preserving manner, and (ii) the advertisement network can only compute aggregate statistics of ad impressions and click-through-rates. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our methods are efficient in terms of both computational and communication cost, especially at the client side
Recommended from our members
Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
On the regulation of personal data distribution in online advertising platforms
Online tracking is the key enabling technology of modern online advertising. In the recently established model of real-time bidding (RTB), the web pages tracked by ad platforms are shared with advertising agencies (also called DSPs), which, in an auction-based system, may bid for user ad impressions. Since tracking data are no longer confined to ad platforms, RTB poses serious risks to privacy, especially with regard to user profiling, a practice that can be conducted at a very low cost by any DSP or related agency, as we reveal here. In this work, we illustrate these privacy risks by examining a data set with the real ad-auctions of a DSP, and show that for at least 55% of the users tracked by this agency, it paid nothing for their browsing data. To mitigate this abuse, we propose a system that regulates the distribution of bid requests (containing user tracking data) to potentially interested bidders, depending on their previous behavior. In our approach, an ad platform restricts the sharing of tracking data by limiting the number of DSPs participating in each auction, thereby leaving unchanged the current RTB architecture and protocols. However, doing so may have an evident impact on the ad platform’s revenue. The proposed system is designed accordingly, to ensure the revenue is maximized while the abuse by DSPs is prevented to a large degree. Experimental results seem to suggest that our system is able to correct misbehaving DSPs, and consequently enhance user privacy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Privacy in online advertising platforms
Online advertising is consistently considered as the pillar of the "free• content on the Web since it is commonly the funding source of websites. Furthermore, the option of delivering personalizad ads has tumed advertising into a really valuable service for users, who receive ads tailored to their interests. Given its success in getting paying customers, online advertising is fueling a billionaire business. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded at an unprecedented rate. However, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prorrpt serious privacy concems.
In view of the inherent corrplexity behind the operation of ad platforms, privacy risks in the online advertising ecosystem could be studied from multiple perspectives. Naturally, most of the efforts unveiling these privacy issues concentrate on a specific entity, technology, behavior or context. However, such a segmented approach rright underestimate the benefits of a wider vision of a systerric problem. A lot of privacy protection echanisms have been proposed from the industry and acaderria. The most popular ones resort to radical strategies that hinder the ad distribution process, thus seriously affecting the online advertising ecosystem. Others involve significantly changing the ecosystem, which unfortunately may not be suitable in these times. Consequently, to encourage the adoption of privacy protection in this context, it is fundamental to pose mechanisms that aim at balancing the trade-off between user privacy and the web business model.
First, this thesis deals with the need to have a wide perspective of the privacy risks for users within the online advertising ecosystem and the protection approaches available. We survey the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting
technologies, and present a thorough overview of the undertying privacy risks and the solutions that may rritigate them. Through a systematic effort, we analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising.Then, we conduct a corrprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and con-pare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and irrpact on the Web. Subsequently, we study the privacy risks derived from real-time bidding, a key enabling technology of modem online advertising. We experimentally explore the potential abuse of the process of user data sharing, necessary to support the auction-based
system in online advertising. Accordingly, we propase a system to regula te the distribution of u ser tracking data to potentially interested entities, depending on their previous behavior.This consists in reducing the nurnber of advertising agencies receiving user data. Doing so may affect the ad platform's revenue, thus the proposed system is designed to maxirrize the revenue while the abuse by advertising agencies is prevented to a large degree. Experimentally, the results of evaluation suggest that this system is able to correct rrisbehaving entities, consequently enhancing user privacy. Finally, we analyze the irrpact of online advertising and tracking from the particular perspective of lberoamerica.We study the third-party and ad tracking triggered within local websites in this heterogeneous region not previously studied. We found out that user location in this context would affect privacy since the intensity of third-party traffic, including advertising related flows of information, varies from country to country when local web traffic is simulated, although the total nurnber of entities behind this traffic seems stable. The type of content served by websites is also a parameter affecting the leve! of third-party tracking:publishers assiciated with news shopping categories generate more third-party traffic and such intensity is exarbated for top-world sitesLa publicitat en lĂnia tĂ© un paper important a Internet que permet finançar habitualment l'operaciĂł de llocs web que ofereixen contingut lliure als usuaris. A mĂ©s, la personalitzaciĂł dels anuncis ha tornat la publicitat en lĂnia un servei valuĂłs per als usuaris. Si aconseguirem que hi hagi molts compradors siguin mĂ©s que possibles, es promourĂ un negoci milionari. El model d'anuncis vigents es basa en una infraestructura completa que lliura els anuncis personalitzats. Pera això, es pot recopilar una gran quantitat de dades d'Ăşs, agregar, processar i vendre molt rĂ pidament. Malauradament, aquestes prĂ ctiques generen riscos de privadesa. Donada la complexitat de l'operaciĂł de les plataformes d'anuncis, els riscos de privacitat es poden estudiar des de diverses perspectives. Naturalment, els esforços per desenvolupar aquests problemes de privacitat es concentren en una entitat, tecnologia, comportament o context especĂfic. Però aquest enfocament subestima els beneficis d'una perspectiva mĂ©s Ă mplia d'un problema integral. Molts mecanismes de protecciĂł han estat proposats des de la indĂşstria i l’à mbit acadèmic. Els mĂ©s populars apliquen estratègies radicals que obstrueixen la distribuciĂł d'anuncis, afectant seriosament l’ecosistema d'anuncis. TambĂ© es pot modificar significativament l’ecosistema, el que no Ă©s factible per la seva conflictivitat. AixĂ, amb la finalitat de fomentar l'adopciĂł de protecciĂł de privacitat, Ă©s fonamental plantejar solucions orientades a equilibrar les necessitats de privacitat amb el model de negocis de la web. Inicialment, la tesi ofereix una visiĂł amplia dels riscos de privacitat i els mecanismes de protecciĂł a ecosistema d'anuncis en lĂnia. Això es pot aconseguir basant-se en una revisiĂł de la infraestructura i tecnologies subjacents en aquest context. Analitza sistemĂ ticament les amenaces i potencies atacants. A continuaciĂł es revisa exhaustivament els mecanismes de privacitat mĂ©s rellevants, i es classifica i es compara segons les garanties de privacitat que s'ofereixen i el seu possible impacte a la web. Seguidament, s'estudia els riscos de privadesa derivats de les ofertes en temps real, una tecnologia clau del sistema d'anuncis en lĂnia modern. Experimentalment, s'inverteixen els riscos del procĂ©s de distribuciĂł de dades d'Ăşs, part del sistema basat en licitacions de la publicitat en lĂnia. Es proposa un sistema que regula la distribuciĂł de dades d'Ăşs a tercers, depenent del seu comportament previ. Això consisteix en reduir el nombre d’agències anunciants que rebin dades d'Ăşs. Per mitigar l’impacte sobre els ingressos del sistema d'anuncis, aquesta reducciĂł Ă©s malaltia i l'objectiu de maximitzar els declaracions ingressades. Experimentalment, es troba que el sistema proposat corregir els comportaments maliciosos, millorant la privacitat dels usuaris. Finalment, s'analitza l'impacte del rastre i la publicitat en lĂnia des de la perspectiva iberoamericana. Estudiem el rastreig de tercers i allò relacionat amb els anuncis que se generen en llocs web locals en aquesta regiĂł heterogènia. Trobem que la ubicaciĂł de l'usuari en aquest context afecta la privacitat de l'usuari ja que aquest rastreig varia de paĂs a paĂs, tot i que el nombre total d'entitats darrere d'aquest transit sembla estable. El tipus de contingut afecta tambĂ© el nivell de rastreig: llocs web de noticies o de compres generen mĂ©s transit cap a tercers i aquesta intensitat s'exacerba en els llocs mĂ©s populars
Privacy in online advertising platforms
Online advertising is consistently considered as the pillar of the "free• content on the Web since it is commonly the funding source of websites. Furthermore, the option of delivering personalizad ads has tumed advertising into a really valuable service for users, who receive ads tailored to their interests. Given its success in getting paying customers, online advertising is fueling a billionaire business. The current advertising model builds upon an intricate infrastructure whose main aim is to deliver personalized ads. For this purpose, a wealth of user data is collected, aggregated, processed and traded at an unprecedented rate. However, the intrusiveness and ubiquity of these practices prorrpt serious privacy concems.
In view of the inherent corrplexity behind the operation of ad platforms, privacy risks in the online advertising ecosystem could be studied from multiple perspectives. Naturally, most of the efforts unveiling these privacy issues concentrate on a specific entity, technology, behavior or context. However, such a segmented approach rright underestimate the benefits of a wider vision of a systerric problem. A lot of privacy protection echanisms have been proposed from the industry and acaderria. The most popular ones resort to radical strategies that hinder the ad distribution process, thus seriously affecting the online advertising ecosystem. Others involve significantly changing the ecosystem, which unfortunately may not be suitable in these times. Consequently, to encourage the adoption of privacy protection in this context, it is fundamental to pose mechanisms that aim at balancing the trade-off between user privacy and the web business model.
First, this thesis deals with the need to have a wide perspective of the privacy risks for users within the online advertising ecosystem and the protection approaches available. We survey the online advertising infrastructure and its supporting
technologies, and present a thorough overview of the undertying privacy risks and the solutions that may rritigate them. Through a systematic effort, we analyze the threats and potential privacy attackers in this scenario of online advertising.Then, we conduct a corrprehensive survey of the most relevant privacy mechanisms, and classify and con-pare them on the basis of their privacy guarantees and irrpact on the Web. Subsequently, we study the privacy risks derived from real-time bidding, a key enabling technology of modem online advertising. We experimentally explore the potential abuse of the process of user data sharing, necessary to support the auction-based
system in online advertising. Accordingly, we propase a system to regula te the distribution of u ser tracking data to potentially interested entities, depending on their previous behavior.This consists in reducing the nurnber of advertising agencies receiving user data. Doing so may affect the ad platform's revenue, thus the proposed system is designed to maxirrize the revenue while the abuse by advertising agencies is prevented to a large degree. Experimentally, the results of evaluation suggest that this system is able to correct rrisbehaving entities, consequently enhancing user privacy. Finally, we analyze the irrpact of online advertising and tracking from the particular perspective of lberoamerica.We study the third-party and ad tracking triggered within local websites in this heterogeneous region not previously studied. We found out that user location in this context would affect privacy since the intensity of third-party traffic, including advertising related flows of information, varies from country to country when local web traffic is simulated, although the total nurnber of entities behind this traffic seems stable. The type of content served by websites is also a parameter affecting the leve! of third-party tracking:publishers assiciated with news shopping categories generate more third-party traffic and such intensity is exarbated for top-world sitesLa publicitat en lĂnia tĂ© un paper important a Internet que permet finançar habitualment l'operaciĂł de llocs web que ofereixen contingut lliure als usuaris. A mĂ©s, la personalitzaciĂł dels anuncis ha tornat la publicitat en lĂnia un servei valuĂłs per als usuaris. Si aconseguirem que hi hagi molts compradors siguin mĂ©s que possibles, es promourĂ un negoci milionari. El model d'anuncis vigents es basa en una infraestructura completa que lliura els anuncis personalitzats. Pera això, es pot recopilar una gran quantitat de dades d'Ăşs, agregar, processar i vendre molt rĂ pidament. Malauradament, aquestes prĂ ctiques generen riscos de privadesa. Donada la complexitat de l'operaciĂł de les plataformes d'anuncis, els riscos de privacitat es poden estudiar des de diverses perspectives. Naturalment, els esforços per desenvolupar aquests problemes de privacitat es concentren en una entitat, tecnologia, comportament o context especĂfic. Però aquest enfocament subestima els beneficis d'una perspectiva mĂ©s Ă mplia d'un problema integral. Molts mecanismes de protecciĂł han estat proposats des de la indĂşstria i l’à mbit acadèmic. Els mĂ©s populars apliquen estratègies radicals que obstrueixen la distribuciĂł d'anuncis, afectant seriosament l’ecosistema d'anuncis. TambĂ© es pot modificar significativament l’ecosistema, el que no Ă©s factible per la seva conflictivitat. AixĂ, amb la finalitat de fomentar l'adopciĂł de protecciĂł de privacitat, Ă©s fonamental plantejar solucions orientades a equilibrar les necessitats de privacitat amb el model de negocis de la web. Inicialment, la tesi ofereix una visiĂł amplia dels riscos de privacitat i els mecanismes de protecciĂł a ecosistema d'anuncis en lĂnia. Això es pot aconseguir basant-se en una revisiĂł de la infraestructura i tecnologies subjacents en aquest context. Analitza sistemĂ ticament les amenaces i potencies atacants. A continuaciĂł es revisa exhaustivament els mecanismes de privacitat mĂ©s rellevants, i es classifica i es compara segons les garanties de privacitat que s'ofereixen i el seu possible impacte a la web. Seguidament, s'estudia els riscos de privadesa derivats de les ofertes en temps real, una tecnologia clau del sistema d'anuncis en lĂnia modern. Experimentalment, s'inverteixen els riscos del procĂ©s de distribuciĂł de dades d'Ăşs, part del sistema basat en licitacions de la publicitat en lĂnia. Es proposa un sistema que regula la distribuciĂł de dades d'Ăşs a tercers, depenent del seu comportament previ. Això consisteix en reduir el nombre d’agències anunciants que rebin dades d'Ăşs. Per mitigar l’impacte sobre els ingressos del sistema d'anuncis, aquesta reducciĂł Ă©s malaltia i l'objectiu de maximitzar els declaracions ingressades. Experimentalment, es troba que el sistema proposat corregir els comportaments maliciosos, millorant la privacitat dels usuaris. Finalment, s'analitza l'impacte del rastre i la publicitat en lĂnia des de la perspectiva iberoamericana. Estudiem el rastreig de tercers i allò relacionat amb els anuncis que se generen en llocs web locals en aquesta regiĂł heterogènia. Trobem que la ubicaciĂł de l'usuari en aquest context afecta la privacitat de l'usuari ja que aquest rastreig varia de paĂs a paĂs, tot i que el nombre total d'entitats darrere d'aquest transit sembla estable. El tipus de contingut afecta tambĂ© el nivell de rastreig: llocs web de noticies o de compres generen mĂ©s transit cap a tercers i aquesta intensitat s'exacerba en els llocs mĂ©s populars.Postprint (published version
CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines
Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective.
The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines.
From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research
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