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Online advertising is progressively moving towards a programmatic model in which ads are matched to actual interests of individuals collected as they browse the web. Le ing the huge debate around privacy aside, a very important question in this area, for which li le is known, is: How much do advertisers pay to reach an individual?In this study, we develop a rst of its kind methodology for computing exactly that -the price paid for a web user by the ad ecosystem -and we do that in real time. Our approach is based on tapping on the Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocol to collect cleartext and encrypted prices for winning bids paid by advertisers in order to place targeted ads. Our main technical contribution is a method for tallying winning bids even when they are encrypted. We achieve this by training a model using as ground truth prices obtained by running our own "probe" ad-campaigns. We design our methodology through a browser extension and a back-end server that provides it with fresh models for encrypted bids. We validate our methodology using a one year long trace of 1600 mobile users and demonstrate that it can estimate a user's advertising worth with more than 82% accuracy.

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If you are not paying for it, you are the product

Papadopoulos

Kourtellis

Rodríguez

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 2017 Internet Measurement Conference

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Cookies and Web Bugs

Cited by 1 publication

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If you are not paying for it, you are the product

If you are not paying for it, you are the product

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