1. TRAP: using TaRgeted Ads to unveil Google personal Profiles
- Author
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Mauro Conti, Angelo Spognardi, Vittoria Cozza, and Marinella Petrocchi
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,Service (systems architecture) ,Computer Science - Cryptography and Security ,Exploit ,Computer science ,02 engineering and technology ,Business model ,Trap (computing) ,World Wide Web ,Computer Science - Computers and Society ,020204 information systems ,Personal Data ,Computers and Society (cs.CY) ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Targeted advertising ,Computer Science Applications ,Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Information Systems ,Computer Networks and Communications ,Google Profile ,Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) ,data privacy ,Mobile apps ,Google Targeted Advertisements ,Computer Science - Social and Information Networks ,advertising data processing ,Privacy Attack ,Visualization ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,MIB My Information Bubble project ,Personally identifiable information ,Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) - Abstract
In the last decade, the advertisement market spread significantly in the web and mobile app system. Its effectiveness is also due thanks to the possibility to target the advertisement on the specific interests of the actual user, other than on the content of the website hosting the advertisement. In this scenario, became of great value services that collect and hence can provide information about the browsing user, like Facebook and Google. In this paper, we show how to maliciously exploit the Google Targeted Advertising system to infer personal information in Google user profiles. In particular, the attack we consider is external from Google and relies on combining data from Google AdWords with other data collected from a website of the Google Display Network. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack, also discussing possible application scenarios. The result of our research shows a significant practical privacy issue behind such type of targeted advertising service, and call for further investigation and the design of more privacy-aware solutions, possibly without impeding the current business model involved in online advertisement., Comment: 7th IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) 2015. 6 pages
- Published
- 2015