Related papers: Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery
All over the world, future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their child. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and especially personal…
Ad platforms such as Facebook, Google and LinkedIn promise value for advertisers through their targeted advertising. However, multiple studies have shown that ad delivery on such platforms can be skewed by gender or race due to hidden…
The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is partially due to the precise targeting features they offer. Although researchers and journalists have found many ways that advertisers can target---or exclude---particular…
Online advertising platforms use algorithmic systems to power the process of matching ads to users, termed ad delivery. Prior audits have demonstrated that ad delivery can be skewed by demographic attributes, such that ads are…
Google's Ad Settings shows the gender and age that Google has inferred about a web user. We compare the inferred values to the self-reported values of 501 survey participants. We find that Google often does not show an inference, but when…
Targeted advertising platforms are widely used by job advertisers to reach potential employees; thus issues of discrimination due to targeting that have surfaced have received widespread attention. Advertisers could misuse targeting tools…
To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Ad Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the profiles Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that explores…
Racial disparity in academia is a widely acknowledged problem. The quantitative understanding of racial based systemic inequalities is an important step towards a more equitable research system. However, because of the lack of robust…
Understanding how racial information impacts human decision making in online systems is critical in today's world. Prior work revealed that race information of criminal defendants, when presented as a text field, had no significant impact…
Digital ads on social-media platforms play an important role in shaping access to economic opportunities. Our work proposes and implements a new third-party auditing method that can evaluate racial bias in the delivery of ads for education…
Search engines have become the gateway to information, products, and services, including those concerning healthcare. Access to reproductive health has been especially complicated in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision by the…
Surnames often convey implicit markers of social status, wealth, and lineage, shaping perceptions in ways that can perpetuate systemic biases and intergenerational inequality. This study is the first of its kind to investigate whether and…
We present the first extensive measurement of the privacy properties of the advertising systems used by privacy-focused search engines. We propose an automated methodology to study the impact of clicking on search ads on three popular…
Web search engines influence perception of social reality by filtering and ranking information. However, their outputs are often subjected to bias that can lead to skewed representation of subjects such as professional occupations or…
Auditing social-media algorithms has become a focus of public-interest research and policymaking to ensure their fairness across demographic groups such as race, age, and gender in consequential domains such as the presentation of…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
We provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and last names for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on…
Online advertising platforms are thriving due to the customizable audiences they offer advertisers. However, recent studies show that advertisements can be discriminatory with respect to the gender or race of the audience that sees the ad,…
We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and…