Skip to main content

Targeted Advertising on the Handset: Privacy and Security Challenges

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Book cover Pervasive Advertising

Part of the book series: Human-Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

Online advertising is currently a rich source of revenue for many Internet giants. With the ever-increasing number of smart phones, there is a fertile market for personalised and localised advertising. A key benefit of using mobile phones is to take advantage of the significant amount of information on phones – such as locations of interest to the user – in order to provide personalised advertisements. Preservation of user privacy, however, is essential for successful deployment of such a system. In this chapter we provide an overview of existing advertising systems and privacy concerns on mobile phones, in addition to a system, MobiAd, which includes protocols for scalable local advertisement download and privacy-aware click report dissemination. In the final section of this chapter we describe some of the security mechanisms used in detecting click-through fraud, and techniques that can be used to ensure that the extra privacy protections of MobiAd are not abused to defraud advertisers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    We elaborate in Sect.  6.7 why a landing page is not essential.

References

  1. Aalto, L., Göthlin, N., Korhonen, J., Ojala, T.: Bluetooth and WAP push based location-aware mobile advertising system. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), pp. 49–58. ACM, New York (2004). doi: 10.1145/990064.990073

    Google Scholar 

  2. AdMob: Admob mobile metrics report. http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Jan-10.pdf (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  3. Ben Abdesslem, F., Parris, I., Henderson, T.: Mobile experience sampling: reaching the parts of Facebook other methods cannot reach. In: Proceedings of the Privacy and Usability Methods Pow-Wow (PUMP). British Computer Society. http://scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/pump2010/papers/benabdesslem.pdf (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  4. Burleigh, S., Hooke, A., Torgerson, L., Fall, K., Cerf, V., Durst, B., Scott, K., Weiss, H.: Delay-tolerant networking: an approach to interplanetary internet. IEEE Commun. Mag. 41(6), 128–136 (2003). doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2003.1204759

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Consolvo, S., Walker, M.: Using the experience sampling method to evaluate ubicomp applications. IEEE Pervas. Comput. 2(2), 24–31 (2003). doi: 10.1109/MPRV.2003.1203750

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Cozza, R.: Forecast: Mobile Communications Devices by Open Operating System, Worldwide, 2008–2015, http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=1619615

  7. Crompton, B.: Tech Deals: Moneysupermarket Launches iPhone App. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/34077/deals-moneysupermarket-launches-iphone-app (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  8. Dingledine, R., Mathewson, N., Syverson, P.: Tor: the second-generation onion router. In: Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 303–320. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Do, T.M., Perez, D.G.: By their apps you shall understand them: mining large-scale patterns of mobile phone usage. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM). ACM, New York (2010). doi: 10.1145/1899475.1899502

    Google Scholar 

  10. European Parliament: Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. OJ. L. 38(281), 31–50 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Falaki, H., Lymberopoulos, D., Mahajan, R., Kandula, S., Estrin, D.: A first look at traffic on smartphones. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC), pp. 281–287. ACM, New York (2010). doi: 10.1145/1879141.1879176

    Google Scholar 

  12. Fall, K.: A delay-tolerant network architecture for challenged internets. In: SIGCOMM ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications, pp. 27–34. ACM, New York (2003). doi: 10.1145/863955.863960

    Google Scholar 

  13. Freudiger, J., Vratonjic, N., Hubaux, J.P.: Towards privacy-friendly online advertising. In: Proceedings of W2SP 2009: Web 2.0 Security and Privacy. http://w2spconf.com/2009/papers/s2p1.pdf (2009). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  14. Greenstein, B., McCoy, D., Pang, J., Kohno, T., Seshan, S., Wetherall, D.: Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol. In: MobiSys ’08: Proceeding of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 40–53. ACM, New York (2008). doi: 10.1145/1378600.1378607

    Google Scholar 

  15. Google Advertising Revenue: http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  16. Guha, S., Reznichenko, A., Tang, K., Haddadi, H., Francis, P.: Serving ads from localhost for performance, privacy, and profit. In: HotNets-VIII: Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks. http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2009/papers/hotnets200%9-final27.pdf (2009). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

    Google Scholar 

  17. Guha, S., Cheng, B., Francis, P.: Challenges in measuring online advertising systems. In: Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC), pp. 81–87. ACM, New York (2010). doi: 10.1145/1879141.1879152

    Google Scholar 

  18. Haddadi, H.: Fighting online click-fraud using bluff ads. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 40(2), 21–25 (2010). doi: 10.1145/1764873.1764877

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Henderson, T., Ben Abdesslem, F.: Scaling measurement experiments to planet-scale: ethical, regulatory and cultural considerations. In: HotPlanet ’09: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics of Planet-Scale Mobility Measurements, pp. 1–5. ACM, New York (2009). doi: 10.1145/1651428.1651436

    Google Scholar 

  20. iAd service: http://advertising.apple.com/ Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  21. Hui, P., Crowcroft, J., Yoneki, E.: BUBBLE rap: social-based forwarding in delay tolerant networks. In: MobiHoc ’08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Symposium on Mobile ad Hoc Networking and Computing, pp. 241–250. ACM, New York (2008). doi: 10.1145/1374618.1374652

    Google Scholar 

  22. Immorlica, N., Jain, K., Mahdian, M., Talwar, K.: Click fraud resistant methods for learning click-through rates. In: Deng, X., Ye, Y. (eds.) Internet and Network Economics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3828, pp. 34–45. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg (2005). doi: 10.1007/11600930_5

    Google Scholar 

  23. Juels, A., Stamm, S., Jakobsson, M.: Combating click fraud via premium clicks. In: SS’07: Proceedings of 16th USENIX Security Symposium on USENIX Security Symposium, pp. 1–10. USENIX Association, Berkeley (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Komulainen, H., Ristola, A., Still, J.: Mobile advertising in the eyes of retailers and consumers – empirical evidence from a real-life experiment. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Business, p. 37. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2006). doi: 10.1109/ICMB.2006.31

    Google Scholar 

  25. Larson, R., Csikszentmihalyi, M.: The experience sampling method. New Dir. Methodol. Soc. Behav. Sci. 15, 41–56 (1983)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Lu, X., Hui, P., Towsley, D., Pu, J., Xiong, Z.: Anti-localization anonymous routing for Delay Tolerant network. Comput. Netw. 54(11), 1899–1910 (2010). doi: 10.1016/j.comnet.2010.03.002

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  27. Mancini, C., Thomas, K., Rogers, Y., Price, B.A., Jedrzejczyk, L., Bandara, A.K., Joinson, A.N., Nuseibeh, B.: From spaces to places: emerging contexts in mobile privacy. In: Ubicomp ’09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (2009). doi: 10.1145/1620545.1620547

    Google Scholar 

  28. MBMS: Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS); Stage 1, 3GPP Specification. http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/22146.htm (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  29. Merisavo, M., Vesanen, J., Arponen, A., Kajalo, S., Raulas, M.: The effectiveness of targeted mobile advertising in selling mobile services: an empirical study. Int. J. Mob. Commun. 4(2), 119–127. http://www.metapress.com/content/4RE0HR5YAARJC061 (2006). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

    Google Scholar 

  30. Milgram, S.: The small-world problem. Psychol. Today 1(1), 61–67 (1967)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  31. Ohm, P.: Broken promises of privacy: responding to the surprising failure of anonymization. Soc. Sci. Res. Network Working Paper Series. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1450006 (2009). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  32. Oliver, S. iPod touch users spend more time using apps than those with iPhones. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/25/ipod_touch_users_spend_more_time_using_apps_than_those_with_iphones.html (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  33. Parris, I., Henderson, T.: Privacy-enhanced social-network routing. Comput. Commun. In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 November 2010, ISSN 0140-3664, doi: 10.1016/j.comcom.2010.11.003. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140366410004767)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  34. Ranganathan, A., Campbell, R.H.: Advertising in a pervasive computing environment. In: WMC ’02: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile Commerce, pp. 10–14. ACM, New York (2002). doi: 10.1145/570705.570708

    Google Scholar 

  35. Shepard, C., Tossel, C., Rahmati, A., Zhong, L., Kortum, P.: Livelab: measuring wireless networks and smartphone users in the field. In: Proceedings of The 3rd Workshop on Hot Topics in Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (HotMetrics). http://hotmetrics.cs.caltech.edu/pdfs/paper12_final.pdf (2010). Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  36. Shye, A., Scholbrock, B., Memik, G.: Into the wild: studying real user activity patterns to guide power optimizations for mobile architectures. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 42). ACM, New York, USA, pp. 168–178. doi=10.1145/1669112.1669135, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1669112.1669135 (2009)

  37. Song, C., Qu, Z., Blumm, N., Barabasi, A.L.: Limits of predictability in Human mobility. Science 327(5968), 1018–1021 (2010). doi: 10.1126/science.1177170

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  38. Spyropoulos, T., Psounis, K., Raghavendra, C.: Efficient routing in intermittently connected mobile networks: the single-copy case. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 16, 1 (February 2008), pp. 63–76. doi=10.1109/TNET.2007.897962, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2007.897962 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Torproject Website: http://www.torproject.org/ Accessed 23 Mar 2011

  40. Toubiana, V., Narayanan, A., Boneh, D., Nissenbaum, H., Barocas, S.: Adnostic: privacy preserving targeted advertising. In: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Network and Distributed System Symposium. Internet Society, San Diego (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Turow, J., Hennessy, M.: Internet privacy and institutional trust. New Media Soc. 9(2), 300–318 (2010). doi: 10.1177/1461444807072219

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hamed Haddadi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Haddadi, H., Hui, P., Henderson, T., Brown, I. (2011). Targeted Advertising on the Handset: Privacy and Security Challenges. In: Müller, J., Alt, F., Michelis, D. (eds) Pervasive Advertising. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-352-7_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-352-7_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-85729-351-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-85729-352-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics