Info

Public Audience

English

60 Minutes

Kaiserslautern

Online tracking of users in support of behavioral advertising is widespread. Several researchers have proposed non-tracking online advertising systems that go well beyond the requirements of the Do-Not-Track initiative launched by the US Federal Trace Commission (FTC). The primary goal of these systems is to allow for behaviorally targeted advertising without revealing user behavior (clickstreams) or user profiles to the ad network. Although these designs purport to be practical solutions, none of them adequately consider a number of important practical aspects. One such aspect is the role of the ad auctions, which today are central to the operation of online advertising systems. Moreover, the systems lack the ability to gather rich statistical data about their operation. They have not been deployed at scale or adequately evaluated in real-life settings. This proposal addresses the challenge of running auctions that leverage user profile information while keeping the user profile private. It also presents our ongoing efforts to build and evaluate both a practical non-tracking advertising system as well as a differentially private data collection system. We describe an experimental Privad prototype equipped with the PDDP querying subsystem and propose a set of experiments designed to gain first-hand experience in running a ``private-by-design'' system.

--email hidden

passcode not visible

logged in users only