SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative Research: Understanding and Mitigating the Privacy and Societal Risks of Advanced Advertising Targeting and Tracking

SaTC：核心：媒介：协作研究：理解和减轻高级广告定位和跟踪的隐私和社会风险

基本信息

批准号：
2333448
负责人：
Aleksandra Korolova
金额：
$ 40万
依托单位：
Princeton University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2022
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2022-10-01 至 2023-09-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2333448&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
SaTC CORE Medium Collaborative Research

项目摘要

Advertising now funds most of the popular web sites and internet services: companies often provide their services for free, in exchange for collecting data from their users as they interact with the service. In recent years, the scale and resolution of user data that platforms collect has led to a dramatic increase in the variety of targeting, reporting, measurement, and tracking mechanisms that platforms offer to advertisers. Unfortunately, our understanding of the privacy and societal risks of these mechanisms has not kept pace with this increase, raising scientific questions about how much advertisers can learn about platform users through these mechanisms, as well as about their potential for acting in a biased or discriminatory way. Because anyone on the Internet can sign up to be an advertiser on all of these platforms -- granting access to these mechanisms and data at very low cost -- understanding their implications is a critical need. The goal of this project is to improve privacy for all users, and raise awareness among users and regulators of the extensive -- and often hidden -- advertising ecosystem that underlies today's popular services, and the privacy and societal risks it poses.This project is following a three-pronged research agenda. The first set of research tasks centers on enhancing privacy, addressing the problem of revealing advertising statistics while providing strong guarantees of user privacy based on methods from the field of differential privacy. The second set of research tasks focuses on detecting and preventing discrimination, addressing the multitude of ways in which the advertising platforms' features could inadvertently or intentionally discriminate against different groups through the choice of which ads to display to which users. The third set of research tasks addresses issues of transparency and control, studying whether current transparency practices are comprehensive and truthful from both users' and regulators' perspectives, and whether the provided control features have the expected effects on ad delivery and align with people's expectations of privacy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

现在，广告为大多数流行的网站和互联网服务提供资金：公司通常免费提供服务，作为交换，在用户与服务交互时收集用户的数据。近年来，平台收集的用户数据的规模和分辨率导致平台向广告商提供的定位、报告、测量和跟踪机制的多样性急剧增加。不幸的是，我们对这些机制的隐私和社会风险的理解并没有跟上这种增长的步伐，这引发了科学问题：广告商可以通过这些机制了解多少平台用户，以及他们以偏见或歧视的方式行事的可能性。方式。因为互联网上的任何人都可以注册成为所有这些平台上的广告商——以非常低的成本授予对这些机制和数据的访问权限——了解它们的含义是至关重要的。该项目的目标是改善所有用户的隐私，并提高用户和监管机构对构成当今流行服务基础的广泛（且往往是隐藏的）广告生态系统及其带来的隐私和社会风险的认识。该项目是遵循三管齐下的研究议程。第一组研究任务以增强隐私为中心，解决广告统计数据泄露的问题，同时基于差分隐私领域的方法为用户隐私提供强有力的保障。第二组研究任务侧重于检测和防止歧视，解决广告平台功能通过选择向哪些用户展示哪些广告而无意或故意歧视不同群体的多种方式。第三组研究任务涉及透明度和控制问题，从用户和监管机构的角度研究当前的透明度实践是否全面和真实，以及所提供的控制功能是否对广告投放产生了预期效果并符合人们的期望。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。