2021/06/03 by Gonçalo Pestana, Iñigo Querejeta-Azurmendi, Pestana, Gonçalo +5
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.01940
openalex publication_date 2021/06/03 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Online advertising fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although\nusers can access most of the web services free of charge, they pay a heavy\ncoston their privacy. They are forced to trust third parties and\nintermediaries, who not only collect behavioral data but also absorb great\namounts of ad revenues. Consequently, more and more users opt out from\nadvertising by resorting to ad blockers, thus costing publishers millions of\ndollars in lost ad revenues. Albeit there are various privacy-preserving\nadvertising proposals (e.g.,Adnostic, Privad, Brave Ads) from both academia and\nindustry, they all rely on centralized management that users have to blindly\ntrust without being able to audit, while they also fail to guarantee the\nintegrity of the per-formance analytics they provide to advertisers.\n In this paper, we design and deploy THEMIS, a novel, decentralized and\nprivacy-by-design ad platform that requires zero trust by users. THEMIS (i)\nprovides auditability to its participants, (ii) rewards users for viewing ads,\nand (iii) allows advertisers to verify the performance and billing reports of\ntheir ad campaigns. By leveraging smart contracts and zero-knowledge schemes,\nwe implement a prototype of THEMIS and early performance evaluation results\nshow that it can scale linearly on a multi sidechain setup while it supports\nmore than 51M users on a single-sidechain.\n