Technology & Economics: Real-Time Ad Bidding and Personal Surveillance

Internet advertisers reach millions of customers through practices that involve real time tracking of users’ online activities. The tracking is commonly conducted through browser cookies by third-party services that facilitate marketing campaigns and gather service analytics. By installing cookies on users’ computers, they track the users as they navigate from one site to another. Other trackers exploit shortcomings in the cache access control and apply cookie-less profiling.

At the same time, user applications, such as commonly used Internet browsers, reveal little or no information about the information flow between the devices and services. That leaves the consumers with no insight about the breadth of the digital footprints they leave while interacting with services and no understanding of how that data is exploited.

We outline a research agenda that investigates several aspects of this problem. That involves (1) characterizing the tracking ecosystem and the value exchange within it, (2) understanding of the users’ attitudes, behaviour, and awareness of the tracking practices, and (3) analysing the protocols and application design that contribute to the problem. We discuss the findings of several studies that investigate these issues. While they motivate us to think of alternatives to the privacy invading practices, they also urge deeper questions about the principles of design and comprehensibility of computing systems.