Information Market for Web Browsing: Design, Usability and Incremental Adoption

TL;DR

This paper proposes an information market system for web browsing that balances user privacy with economic incentives, demonstrating its feasibility and profitability through a field study and large-scale simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel privacy system that aligns user incentives with online advertising revenue, maintaining economic viability and improving web performance.

Findings

Users are willing to sell browsing information.

The system can be profitable for users and advertisers.

The prototype maintains or improves web performance.

Abstract

Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject to performance degradation for deploying them. In this study, we take a step towards realizing a system for online privacy that is mutually beneficial to users and online advertisers: an information market. This system not only maintains economic viability for online services, but also provides users with financial compensation to encourage them to participate. We prototype and evaluate an information market that provides privacy and revenue to users while preserving and sometimes improving their Web performance. We evaluate feasibility of the market via a one month field study with 63 users and find that users are indeed willing to sell their browsing information. We also use Web traces of millions of users to drive a simulation study to evaluate the system at scale. We find that the system can indeed be profitable to both users and online advertisers.