Enhancing Online Privacy In Behavioral Targeting Advertisement Information Technology Essay

Enhancing Online Privacy In Behavioral Tar realiseing Advertisement schooling Technology EssayAdvertisements argon part of distributivelyday life hitherto if its not a choice. They be placed in every come-at-able physic everyy spot and in every kind of mass media. publicise has beat an important impart of modern discipline downeting 19. The purpose of advertizements lowlife be brand awareness, brand promotion or brand gross revenue and the method varies base on the media calld.Internet media is an important communication channel and could not be an exception thitherfore, display banner publicizing has become a big industry especially the latest years as advertisers struggle to approach ever-larger audiences with higher susceptibilities to consume. It is estimated that global online publicizing market is cherished $40 billion in 2009 and grown to $80 billion by 2010.5Yet, people actively avoid looking at online banners 1 and empirical and experimental studies sh ow that advertising messages are noisy 2. Meaning that people are anointed by the existence of publicizings on clear and therefore the potency of the ad campaign might be low for people that dislike this noise. A way to measure the effectiveness and success of online banner advertisements is CTR (Click Through Rate). A CTR is calculated by dividing the amount of drug functionrs who clicked on an ad within a blade page by the amount of times the ad was in total delivered (impressions).The average click- with rate of banner ads has been decreasing lie downently, from 3% in the mid-1990s to 0.2% (eMarketer 2004).Studies showed that since we are faced with an ever expanding mass of nurture the pickax of the relevant bits of instruction seems to become more important than the retrieval of entropy 3. The relevance of information is subjective and is tie ind to the individualised disport of each user. Hence, the thinker of behavioural caning within online advertisement w as very quickly expanded in all countries and is today considered to be a mandatory service for the online advertisement industry. Online Behavioural butt jointing (OAB) is not a new practice within online advertisement industry it was first released in late 1990s from DoubleClick to track users crossways sites and present banner advertisements base on their browsing preferences. 6Interest based advertising is not a static area of technology. On the contrast, its endlessly evolving and adapted to new techniques and methods, excogitationing to increase the revenues by succeeding on quarrying the crystallise potential customers based on their private interests. Its evolution combines web mine in data analysis of on-line users behaviour and machine learning in optimizing web on-line advertising 1Companies in the industry use Interest based advertising as a solution for optimizing the selection of ads to display for a certain user. The selection of ads is based on an interest p rofile built up during visits to websites within a particularised ad network.Problems with behavioural targetingThe problem in todays solution within interest based advertisement is that since users have the ability to choose to surf in personal mode, by selecting this choice from the browser, it is impossible to gather anonymous data some their interests.In advance, although online behavioral advertising promises to decrease the noise and increase the users interest, there is a great concern and protest, particularly among silence and consumer advocacy crowds 6 chiefly because of the technology that is been used.In addition to the general disapproval of the position that the volume of advertising companies warehousing and use their customers information in a non-ethical way, an future refinement of the methods which advertising companies use to inform their users about their online trailing is judge due to an EU directive issued on 2009 15. This directive is expected to redefine the implementation and operation of latest methods used for retrieval of identification data, since every online advertising agency should explicitly ask for the users consent before accessing and process his data.Current technology backgroundAs mentioned previously, apart from the fact that current behavioral advertising techniques fail to withdraw the appropriate information regarding their target groups, they also neglect the security concerns. Most of them seem to focus more on attracting users attention and persuade them to purchase without taking into consideration their privateness. As a result, security attacks are highly related with current advertising methods, thus making customers suspicious and face quite an negatively the fact that their online behavior is monitored.In this section we result first provide a brief description of the available techniques that are widely used from the advertising industry, in order to familiarize the reader with some primar y fundamental concepts. Consequently, we will specify which of these technologies are used by some of the confidential information advertising companies aiming to track users online preferences, how they postulate to deal with security attacks and why they withal fail to convince people that they perform their solitude comfortion effectively. iodine of the close common techniques used to track online behavior nowadays are Cookies. These are text files created by web sites and placed into users hard disk. When a user is visiting a site this file is placed automatically in a specific repository that each browser retains to store cookies. The next time the user choses to visit again this specific site, he will be uniquely identified based on the information that cookie has stored for him7. This information can be related to his browsing history, such(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as the sites he has visited, the usernames and passwords he provided to log into them etc., or information regarding his systems or networks details, such as browser type and version, operating system he uses or his IP address8.Another, relatively new introduced method is Deep portion Inspection (DPI). It is mainly carried out within the users ISP consent and cooperation with advertising companies, since it uses specific software and hardware aiming to see information regarding the online preferences of ISP customers 9. This information may entangle details regarding sensitive private data, such as name, sex or location of the user as well as his browsing and get history.On the other hand, web beacons are often used for behavioral trailing also. They are usually a chunk of code joined to a graphic image that is not visible to the user in the foreground of a Web page. It can be used to apprehend either anonymous data, and in this case are stored in the pile up of web browser or personal information which can be retrieved for example from an email containing the web b eacon 10.The techniques mentioned in the previous split are widely used by some of the most ascendant companies in the advertising industry, which aim to construct the users profiles based on the tracking of their interests. In this section we will examine how companies like DoubleClick, Phorm and Yahoo tapdance the available web techniques to gather information about their users and how they manage to cling to the concealing of them.DoubleClick, which was founded in 90s and managed to evolve into one of the most well-known online advertising agencies was acquired by Google Inc.in 2007. They use web cookies that are stored on users browser each time he chooses to visit Google, DoubleClick or some of their partners (YouTube, Amazon etc.). Hence, they retrieve information based on both general browsing history of the user as well as his searching or buying history through specific advertising sites. The DoubleClick Cookie is stored in the web browser as a log file containing the time that the user interacted with the advertisement, the users IP address, a figure of speech specifying the advertisement, a unique identification number for the users browser and the url path of the site that hosts the advertisement 11. As such, DoubleClick claims to use information that dont violate users privacy and dont use sensitive personal data to construct the users online profile.Phorm uses Deep Packet Inspection to acquire information from the users online preferences. It cooperates with ISPs to nail data regarding their customers and uses the existing ISP infrastructure to achieve this. The main procedure it follows is to mark each browser with a different random number and relate it with the 10 most often keywords that appear in the visited sites and as such construct a channel, which is a specific subset of users interests 13.Yahoo makes use of web beacons and the so called Yahoo Cookies, in order to offer their users more focussed to their interests advertisements 14. They use both anonymous and personal data, but in the latter(prenominal) case they require partners to disclose the presence of web beacons in their privacy policies and state what choices are available to users regarding the disposition and use of this information, as verbalize in their website14. As such, they rely on their partners privacy policies to efficiently protect the personal information of their users and also inform the user about the accomplish of collecting his private data.Related privacy concernsDespite the fact that all the previously mentioned advertising agencies offer an opt-out choice to their users 15, which allow them to disable the tracking methods operation, there is a lot of discussion about the level in which they succeed in protecting their users privacy. The greater issue of controversy amidst privacy advocates and advertising agencies focuses on whether all these companies actually use the retrieved information in an ethical way, and if this information is indeed anonymous. Numerous reports depict that Abacus Alliances, which owns databases containing personal information and is one of the major cooperators of DoubleClick utilize sensitive data of DoubleClicks visitors 12. Phorm has been forever and a day accused from UK tabloids and Privacy Protection Organizations to infringe Internet Users rights by acquiring and storing personal information, and has also intrigued EU s interest which has launched several legitimate proceedings against UK for not complying with the EU security rules 20. explore MethodologyIn order to provide an accomplished approach to our research we consider that the most suitable inquiry method is Qualitative Methodology and more specifically the conceptual inductive research process since it this is used in more or less every workplace and study environment 17 and covers our research structure and pith. indoors a qualitative study we can generate data in the form of participant descriptions of their bugger offs and use literary analytic procedures to produce higher-order descriptions and understandings of the investigated experience 18.First, we will investigate the dominant tendencies of tracking users online behaviour and create the gibe profiles for marketing purposes. By looking into the main web tools and techniques they deploy to retrieve information about the visitors of their sites, we will try to find out how they manage to build an overall picture of their preferences. We will particularly examine these techniques through a point of view of privacy concerns. In fact we will examine the ways they claim to successfully use towards protecting the privacy of their users, and in which degree they actually manage to achieve this. This part of our go off will be carried out through a data collection procedure based on three different sources of informationThe decreed sites of these companies, in which they describe the radical techniques that use for online beh avioral targeting and what policies they follow to protect the privacy of their users.Articles and papers which discuss and guess these techniques, by pointing out the basic points in which they fail to efficiently provide privacy security.Previous surveys and statistics which argue that either users are not interested in the advertisements they are undefended to, or their distrust to the level of the protection they perceive that these companies offer to them.On the next step, our research will deal with a combination of technologies that aim to collect anonymous information regarding customers behaviour and use them for behavioural advertisement targeting. As such, its goal will be to succeed in providing efficient advertise targeting along with showing respect to the users need for privacy and freedom of choice.On the third part of our research, we will try to testify the toleration of our proposed technique. We consider that the most suitable way to achieve this is within a questionnaire that will give us feedback for our proposal.Related ResearchThe selection of the target group for this questionnaire was based on the following criteriaThe target group should consist of people that have regular contact with various Web sites. This pie-eyeds that they have already experienced being exposed to online advertisements, and as such will be better able to express a well-argued touch about online advertising issues.It would be also useful that they acquire basic knowledge regarding the common tools and methods basically used to track their online behavior. Of course this doesnt mean that they should have in deep knowledge of the technical aspects of these methods, but rather a general sense of how it is feasible for an advertising company to get information about their online behavior.The above consequently imply that the target group should consist of young-aged people, who are the main Internet users and usually have casual interaction with web applicati ons.For practical purposes it would be more convenient that the target group is easily accessible from us and is also familiar with Research and Scientific concepts. As such, it will be of greater interest to them to take part in our survey.For the above reasons we regarded that the most suitable target audience for our questionnaire are KTH and DSV students. Our questions will deal with both examining their opinion about the effectiveness of our proposal in correctly identifying their interests and defining the level of their trust to the privacy protection that it guarantees. The final step will be to collect and evaluate the results coming out of our survey, in order to reach our final conclusions. belles-lettres references1 Drze, X., and Hussherr, F.-X. (2004). Internet Advertising Is Anybody Watching? Journalof Interactive Marketing , 8-23.2 Bharat N. Anand Ron Shachar (2009) Targeted advertising as a signal Quant Mark Econ (2009) 7237-2663Hildebrandt, M. and Gutwirth, S. (eds .), Profiling the European Citizen, Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Springer, p.1 (2008) (Profiling the European Citizen)4 J. Jaworska and M. Sydow (2008) Behavioural Targeting in On-Line Advertising An Empirical register5 Policy Engagement Network The Information Systems and Innovation Group, ONLINE ADVERTISINGConfronting the Challenges. may 20096 V.Toubiana, A.Narayanan, D.Boneh, (2009) Adnostic Privacy Preserving Targeted Advertising7 JOON S. PARK AND RAVI SANDHU, Secure Cookies on the Web, IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING, July-August 20008 Daniel Lin, Michael C. 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