Jiang Zhang (University of Southern California), Konstantinos Psounis (University of Southern California), Muhammad Haroon (University of California, Davis), Zubair Shafiq (University of California, Davis)

Online behavioral advertising, and the associated tracking paraphernalia, poses a real privacy threat. Unfortunately, existing privacy-enhancing tools are not always effective against online advertising and tracking. We propose HARPO, a principled learning-based approach to subvert online behavioral advertising through obfuscation. HARPO uses reinforcement learning to adaptively interleave real page visits with fake pages to distort a tracker’s view of a user’s browsing profile. We evaluate HARPO against real-world user profiling and ad targeting models used for online behavioral advertising. The results show that HARPO improves privacy by triggering more than 40% incorrect interest segments and 6×higher bid values. HARPO outperforms existing obfuscation tools by as much as 16×for the same overhead. HARPO is also able to achieve better stealthiness to adversarial detection than existing obfuscation tools. HARPO meaningfully advances the state-of-the-art in leveraging obfuscation to subvert online behavioral advertising.

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Bingyong Guo (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yuan Lu (Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhenliang Lu (The University of Sydney), Qiang Tang (The University of Sydney), jing xu (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhenfeng Zhang (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

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Jim Alves-Foss, Varsha Venugopal (University of Idaho)

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Mridula Singh (CISPA - Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Marc Roeschlin (ETH Zurich), Aanjhan Ranganathan (Northeastern University), Srdjan Capkun (ETH Zurich)

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Aditya Singh Rathore (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Yijie Shen (Zhejiang University), Chenhan Xu (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Jacob Snyderman (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Jinsong Han (Zhejiang University), Fan Zhang (Zhejiang University), Zhengxiong Li (University of Colorado Denver), Feng Lin (Zhejiang University), Wenyao Xu (University at Buffalo, SUNY), Kui Ren (Zhejiang University)

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