Towards Privacy-Friendly Online Advertising

Modern web sites commonly interact with third-party 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. The authors 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.