Who's Most Targeted and Does My New Adblocker Really Help: A Profile-based Evaluation of Personalized Advertising

Abstract

There is limited prior work studying how the ad personalization experienced by different users is impacted by the use of adblockers, geographic location, the user's persona, or what browser they use. To address this void, this paper presents a novel profile-based evaluation of the personalization experienced by carefully crafted user profiles. Our evaluation framework impersonates different users and captures how the personalization changes over time, how it changes when adding or removing an extension, and perhaps most importantly how the results differ depending on the profile's persona (e.g., interest, occupation, age, gender), geographic location (US East, US West, UK), what browser extension they use (none, AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, CatBlock), what browser they use (Chrome, Firefox), and whether they are logged in to their Google account. By comparing and contrasting observed differences we provide insights that help explain why some user groups may feel more targeted than others and why some people may feel even more targeted after having turned on their adblocker.