Serving Ads from localhost for Performance, Privacy, and Profit

Online advertising is a major economic force in the Internet today. Today’s deployments, however, erode privacy and degrade performance as browsers wait for ad networks to deliver ads. In this paper we pose the question: is it possible to build a practical private online advertising system? To this end we present an initial design where ads are served from the endhost. It is attractive from three standpoints — privacy, profit, and performance: tracking the user’s profile on their computer and not at a third-party improves privacy; better targeting and potentially lower operating costs can improve profits; and relying more on the local endhost rather than a distant central third-party can improve performance. In this paper we explore whether such a system is practical with an eye towards scalability, costs, and deployability. Based on a feasibility study conducted over traces from over 31K users and 130K ads, we believe our approach holds much promise.