Not All Adware is Badware : Towards Privacy-Aware Advertising

Online advertising is a major economic force in the Internet today. A basic goal of any advertising system is to accurately target the ad to the recipient audience. While Internet technology brings the promise of extremely well-targeted ad placement, there have always been serious privacy concerns surrounding personalization. Today there is a constant battle between privacy advocates and advertisers, where advertisers try to push new personalization technologies, and privacy advocates try to stop them. As long as privacy advocates, however, are unable to propose an alternative personalization system that is private, this is a battle they are destined to lose. This paper presents the framework for such an alternative system, the Private Verifiable Advertising (Privad). We describe the privacy issues associated with today’s advertising systems, describe Privad, and discuss its pros and cons and the challenges that remain.