Florian Lachner, Minzhe Yuan Chen Cheng, Theodore Olsauskas-Warren (Google)

Online behavioral advertising is a double-edged sword. While relevant display ads are generally considered useful, opaque tracking based on third-party cookies has reached unfettered sprawl and is deemed to be privacy-intrusive. However, existing ways to preserve privacy do not sufficiently balance the needs of both users and the ecosystem. In this work, we evaluate alternative browser controls. We leverage the idea of inferring interests on users’ devices and designed novel browser controls to manage these interests. Through a mixed method approach, we studied how users feel about this approach. First, we conducted pilot interviews with 9 participants to test two design directions. Second, we ran a survey with 2,552 respondents to measure how our final design compares with current cookie settings. Respondents reported a significantly higher level of perceived privacy and feeling of control when introduced to the concept of locally inferred interests with an option for removal.

View More Papers

A Comparison of Three Approaches to Assist Users in...

Michael Clark (Brigham Young University), Scott Ruoti (The University of Tennessee), Michael Mendoza (Imperial College London), Kent Seamons (Brigham Young University)

Read More

DiffCSP: Finding Browser Bugs in Content Security Policy Enforcement...

Seongil Wi (KAIST), Trung Tin Nguyen (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University), Jihwan Kim (KAIST), Ben Stock (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Sooel Son (KAIST)

Read More

He-HTLC: Revisiting Incentives in HTLC

Sarisht Wadhwa (Duke University), Jannis Stoeter (Duke University), Fan Zhang (Duke University, Yale University), Kartik Nayak (Duke University)

Read More