Related papers: Beyond content analysis: Detecting targeted ads vi…
Crowdsourcing technologies rely on groups of people to input information that may be critical for decision-making. This work examines obfuscation in the context of reporting technologies. We show that widespread use of reporting platforms…
There are a large number of competing ADXs on the Internet. It is the primary demand to identify and compare the advertising performance of ADX. Traditional method relies on training artificial online personas to represent behavioral…
This PhD thesis discusses how European law could improve privacy protection in the area of behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting, also referred to as online profiling, involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the…
Firms implementing digital advertising campaigns face a complex problem in determining the right match between their advertising creatives and target audiences. Typical solutions to the problem have leveraged non-experimental methods, or…
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) represent a critical operational challenge for the online advertising industry, requiring substantial infrastructure investment while promising improved consumer privacy protection. Even when PETs may…
Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However, with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers are radical…
Data sensing and gathering is an essential task for various information-driven services in smart cities. On the one hand, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors can be deployed at certain fixed locations to capture data reliably but suffer from…
Data sharing between online trackers and advertisers is a key component in online behavioral advertising. This sharing can be facilitated through a variety of processes, including those not observable to the user's browser. The…
Although digital advertising fuels much of today's free Web, it typically does so at the cost of online users' privacy, due to the continuous tracking and leakage of users' personal data. In search for new ways to optimize the effectiveness…
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…
Online advertising is progressively moving towards a programmatic model in which ads are matched to actual interests of individuals collected as they browse the web. Letting the huge debate around privacy aside, a very important question in…
Online political advertising is a central aspect of modern election campaigning for influencing public opinion. Computational analysis of political ads is of utmost importance in political science to understand the characteristics of…
Recent years have seen a new form of advertisement campaigns emerge: those involving so-called social media influencers. These influencers accept money in return for promoting products via their social media feeds. Although this constitutes…
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…
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…
Online advertising has typically been more personalized than offline advertising, through the use of machine learning models and real-time auctions for ad targeting. One specific task, predicting the likelihood of conversion (i.e.\ the…
Behavioral targeting, or online profiling, is a hotly debated topic. Much of the collection of personal information on the Internet is related to behavioral targeting, although research suggests that most people don't want to receive…
Crowdfunding is an emerging finance platform for creators to fund their efforts by soliciting relatively small contributions from a large number of individuals using the Internet. Due to the unique rules, a campaign succeeds in trading only…
The proliferation of spam on the Web has necessitated the development of machine learning models to automate their detection. However, the dynamic nature of spam and the sophisticated evasion techniques employed by spammers often lead to…
Terms and conditions (T&Cs) are pervasive on the web and often contain important information for consumers, but are rarely read. Previous research has explored methods to surface alarming privacy policies using manual labelers, natural…