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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…
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…
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…
Political campaigns are increasingly turning to digital advertising to reach voters. These platforms empower advertisers to target messages to platform users with great precision, including through inferences about those users' political…
Online advertising on platforms such as Google or Facebook has become an indispensable outreach tool, including for applications where it is desirable to engage different demographics in an equitable fashion, such as hiring, housing, civic…
Users' behavioral footprints online enable firms to discover behavior-based user segments (or, segments) and deliver segment specific messages to users. Following the discovery of segments, delivery of messages to users through preferred…
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…
Limited transparency in targeted advertising on online content delivery platforms can breed mistrust for both viewers (of the content and ads) and advertisers. This user study (n=864) explores how explanations for targeted ads can bridge…
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing…
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…
Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce…
When spreading information over social networks, seeding algorithms selecting users to start the dissemination play a crucial role. The majority of existing seeding algorithms focus solely on maximizing the total number of reached nodes,…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Many digital platforms offer advertisers experimentation tools like Meta's Lift and A/B tests to optimize their ad campaigns. Lift tests compare outcomes between users eligible to see ads versus users in a no-ad control group. In contrast,…
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…
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.…
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…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
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…