Who's Most Targeted and Does My New Adblocker Really Help: A Profile-based Evaluation of Personalized Advertising
Sofia Bertmar, Johanna Gerhardsen, Alice Ekblad, Anna Hoglund, Julia Mineur, Isabell Oknegard Enavall, Minh-Ha Le, and Niklas Carlsson
Paper:
Sofia Bertmar, Johanna Gerhardsen, Alice Ekblad, Anna Hoglund, Julia Mineur, Isabell Oknegard Enavall, Minh-Ha Le, and Niklas Carlsson,
"Who's Most Targeted and Does My New Adblocker Really Help: A Profile-based Evaluation of Personalized Advertising",
Proc. ACM CCS Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (ACM WPES @CCS),
Nov. 2021.
(pdf,
extended)
Abstract:
There is limited prior work studying how the ad personalization experienced by different users
is impacted by the use of adblockers, geographic location, the user's persona, or what browser they use.
To address this void, this paper presents a novel profile-based evaluation of the personalization
experienced by carefully crafted user profiles. Our evaluation framework impersonates different
users and captures how the personalization changes over time, how it changes when adding or removing
an extension, and perhaps most importantly how the results differ depending on the profile's persona
(e.g., interest, occupation, age, gender), geographic location (US East, US West, UK), what browser
extension they use (none, AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, CatBlock), what browser they use
(Chrome, Firefox), and whether they are logged in to their Google account.
By comparing and contrasting observed differences we provide insights that help explain why
some user groups may feel more targeted than others and why some people may feel even more
targeted after having turned on their adblocker.
Software and datasets
To help build upon our work, we plan to make available code
and datasets with the full/extended publication of this work
(still under submission so analysis may be extended and want to avoid being scoped by our own dataset).
If you would like access sooner, please email Niklas.