Pay-per-tracking: a collaborative masking model for web browsing

Web tracking is the key enabling technology of modern online advertising and, at the same time, the source of serious privacy concerns. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a variety of technologies whose main goal is to address these concerns. However, ad blockers and anti-trackers e...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Parra Arnau, Javier|||0000-0002-1772-1088
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/404197
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/404197
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2016.12.036
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Data protection.
User privacy
Web tracking
User profiling
Collaborative masking
Privacy-utility trade-of
Protecció de dades
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica
Descripción
Sumario:Web tracking is the key enabling technology of modern online advertising and, at the same time, the source of serious privacy concerns. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a variety of technologies whose main goal is to address these concerns. However, ad blockers and anti-trackers eliminate all forms of tracking and advertising and therefore fail to reconcile user privacy and the current Internet business model. In this paper, we propose a new tracking paradigm that aims at returning control to users over tracking and advertising, and allowing them to participate in the monetization of their browsing data. The proposed paradigm breaks with the current barter model of exchanging privacy for services and, at the same time, it may preserve the Internet economic model where content is paid from advertisement revenue. We have designed a system architecture that implements this model in practice, and optimizes the exchange of privacy for money. Our ultimate aim is to strike a better balance between user privacy and the economic model that sustains the Web, and thus overcome the deadlock caused by the ad blocking wars. Experimental results with real browsing data demonstrate the suitability and feasibility of our approach.