A PhD defence is a great way to bring interesting people to Denmark, and Piotr’s defense on June 13th is no exception. This time we’re lucky to have recent NSF Career grant recipient Christo Wilson from Northeastern University visiting. Christo’s work includes auditing algorithms, security and privacy, and online social networks. Much of his work focuses on using measured data to analyze and understand complex phenomena on the Web. In many cases, he has leveraged the knowledge gained from measurements of the Web to build systems that improve security, privacy, and transparency for users – and getting lots of nice press coverage in the process.
- Time: Monday June 13th, 10am
- Location: DTU, Building 321, 1st floor lab space
Title: Caught Red Handed: Tracing Information Flows Between Ad Exchanges Using Retargeted Ads
Abstract: Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are seriously concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad exchanges, and thus underestimate the privacy risks associated with online tracking.
In reality, the modern ad ecosystem is fueled by a flow of user data between trackers and ad exchanges. Although recent work has shown that ad exchanges routinely perform cookie matching with other exchanges, these studies are based on brittle heuristics that cannot detect all forms of information sharing, especially under adversarial conditions.
In this study, we develop a methodology that is able to detect client- and server-side flows of information between arbitrary ad exchanges. Our key insight is to leverage retargeted ads as a mechanism for identifying information flows. Intuitively, our methodology works because it relies on the semantics of how exchanges serve ads, rather than focusing on specific cookie matching mechanisms. Using crawled data on 35,448 ad impressions, we show that our methodology can successfully categorize four different kinds of information sharing between ad exchanges, including cases were existing heuristic methods fail.
sune lehmann 