Related papers: Inferring Tracker-Advertiser Relationships in the …
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…
Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad…
In classical causal inference, inferring cause-effect relations from data relies on the assumption that units are independent and identically distributed. This assumption is violated in settings where units are related through a network of…
Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose Harpo, a…
Being able to check whether an online advertisement has been targeted is essential for resolving privacy controversies and implementing in practice data protection regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA. In this paper we describe the…
Due to the involvement of multiple intermediaries without trusted parties, lack of proper regulations, and a complicated supply chain, ad impression discrepancy affects online advertising. This issue causes up to $82 billion annual revenue…
Traditional online advertising systems for sponsored search follow a cascade paradigm with retrieval, pre-ranking,ranking, respectively. Constrained by strict requirements on online inference efficiency, it tend to be difficult to deploy…
With online payment platforms being ubiquitous and important, fraud transaction detection has become the key for such platforms, to ensure user account safety and platform security. In this work, we present a novel method for detecting…
It is of high interest for a company to identify customers expected to bring the largest profit in the upcoming period. Knowing as much as possible about each customer is crucial for such predictions. However, their demographic data,…
Displaying banner advertisements (in short, ads) on webpages has usually been discussed as an Internet economics topic where a publisher uses auction models to sell an online user's page view to advertisers and the one with the highest bid…
User behaviour targeting is essential in online advertising. Compared with sponsored search keyword targeting and contextual advertising page content targeting, user behaviour targeting builds users' interest profiles via tracking their…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
Click prediction is one of the fundamental problems in sponsored search. Most of existing studies took advantage of machine learning approaches to predict ad click for each event of ad view independently. However, as observed in the…
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…
Modern Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) present complex layouts where multiple elements compete for visibility. Attention modelling is crucial for optimising web design and computational advertising, whereas attention metrics can inform…
Retargeting ads are increasingly prevalent on the Internet as their effectiveness has been shown to outperform conventional targeted ads. Retargeting ads are not only based on users' interests, but also on their intents, i.e. commercial…
Websites are constantly adapting the methods used, and intensity with which they track online visitors. However, the wide-range enforcement of GDPR since one year ago (May 2018) forced websites serving EU-based online visitors to eliminate…
Since most countries are coming up with online privacy regulations, such as GDPR in the EU, online publishers need to find a balance between revenue from targeted advertisement and user privacy. One way to be able to still show targeted…
Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by…
Sponsored search is an important monetization channel for search engines, in which an auction mechanism is used to select the ads shown to users and determine the prices charged from advertisers. There have been several pieces of work in…