2016/02/05 by Javier Parra‐Arnau, Javier Parra-Arnau, Parra-Arnau, Javier +4
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Caching and Content Delivery #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #cs.CR #cs.CY
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1602.02046
arxiv created 2016/02/05 · openalex publication_date 2016/02/05 · arxiv updated 2016/02/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 myriad of ad-blocking and anti-tracking tools, whose aim is to return control to users over advertising. The problem with these technologies, however, is that they are extremely limited and radical in their approach: users can only choose either to block or allow all ads. With around 200 million people regularly using these tools, the economic model of the Web ---in which users get content free in return for allowing advertisers to show them ads--- is at serious peril. In this paper, we propose a smart Web technology that aims at bringing transparency to online advertising, so that users can make an informed and equitable decision regarding ad blocking. The proposed technology is implemented as a Web-browser extension and enables users to exert fine-grained control over advertising, thus providing them with certain guarantees in terms of privacy and browsing experience, while preserving the Internet economic model. Experimental results in a real environment demonstrate the suitability and feasibility of our approach, and provide preliminary findings on behavioral targeting from real user browsing profiles.