Towards Privacy-Friendly Online Advertising

Modern web sites commonly interact with thirdparty domains to integrate advertisements and generate revenue from them. To improve the relevance of advertisements, online advertisers track user activities online with third-party cookies. However, excessive online tracking might cause unreasonable access to users’ browsing information. Users are thus in need of a simple way to control the sharing of their browsing information with advertisers in order to protect their privacy. We survey current techniques to conceal browsing information from third parties (e.g., block third-party cookies) and propose a novel approach that enables advertisements to have discrimination capabilities without allowing for excessive tracking of users. Our solution uses a collection of third-party cookies to restrict the tracking on a per web site basis. We present various implementations of our proposal and provide a proof of concept code to demonstrate its feasibility.