(Draft): Perceived User Benefits of Competing Ad-Blocking Strategies

Ad-blocking adoption has seen phenomenal levels of increase globally over the past several years. The advertising and technology industries have started to coalesce and respond to this threat by devising adblocking strategies that will block the most annoying forms of advertising by default. However, this approach only partially addresses the threats that Internet users perceive from online behavioral advertising, which is indicated by a long-standing and growing body of research. This research has demonstrated the complex and contextual nature of users’ preferences and norms for how they disclose personal information, which points to an opportunity for browser technologies to offer a more nuanced approach in managing the data exchange between users and advertisers. This research attempts to directly inform the design of privacy protecting tools in the browser that go further towards meeting users’ privacy preferences. 15 participants were recruited to evaluate and provide feedback on different ad-blocking approaches in the browser. The results indicated some commonly perceived bad advertising practices that users desire protection from that includes: interrupting and annoying ads, retargeted ads, malvertising and dishonest and misleading advertising. Index Terms – online behavioral advertising, retargeted advertising, privacy protecting technology, ad-blocking, perceived privacy benefits.