AdPExT: Designing a Tool to Assess Information Gleaned from Browsers by Online Advertising Platforms

Abstract

The world of online advertising is directly dependent on data collection of the online browsing habits of individuals to enable effective advertisement targeting and retargeting. However, these data collection practices can cause leakage of private data belonging to website visitors (endusers) without their knowledge. The growing privacy concern of end-users is amplified by a lack of trust and understanding of what and how advertisement trackers are collecting and using their data. This paper presents an investigation to restore the trust or validate the concerns. We aim to facilitate the assessment of the actual end-user related data being collected by advertising platforms (APs) by means of a critical discussion but also the development of a new tool, AdPExT (Advertising Parameter Extraction Tool), which can be used to extract third-party parameter key-value pairs at an individual key-value level. Furthermore, we conduct a survey covering mostly United Kingdom-based frequent internet users to gather the perceived sensitivity sentiment for various representative tracking parameters. End-users have a definite concern with regards to advertisement tracking of sensitive data by global dominating platforms such as Facebook and Google.

Internet User Trackers and Where to Find Them

“…In case of ETag usage for removing cookies, the browser's cache needs to be cleaned every time after a visit to the website, including "Incognito" visits. The cookies that are renewed despite the attempts to clean them are called evercookies or zombie-cookies [10], [48], [51], [52]. Cookies that have similar behaviour but are observed among various websites are called respawning cookies.…”

“…The terms such as "publisher" -a website that is displaying an ad, "advertiser" -a person or a company willing to let the user know about a product or a service, and "Ad Platform" -a service that allows publishers and advertisers to meet, are used in the other research [9], [10] and will be used in this work in the same context.…”