Privacy-preserving targeted mobile advertising: A Blockchain-based framework for mobile ads

TL;DR

This paper proposes a Blockchain-based framework for privacy-preserving targeted mobile advertising, enabling secure user profiling, ad requests, billing, and access policy management in a decentralized manner.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized Blockchain framework for targeted ads that preserves user privacy and supports secure ad delivery and billing mechanisms.

Findings

Processing delays are acceptable for various policy tree sizes.

Encryption and decryption times are comparable to existing ad systems.

The framework effectively supports privacy-preserving targeted advertising.

Abstract

The targeted advertising is based on preference profiles inferred via relationships among individuals, their monitored responses to previous advertising and temporal activity over the Internet, which has raised critical privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a novel proposal for a Blockchain-based advertising platform that provides: a system for privacy preserving user profiling, privately requesting ads from the advertising system, the billing mechanisms for presented and clicked ads, the advertising system that uploads ads to the cloud according to profiling interests, various types of transactions to enable advertising operations in Blockchain-based network, and the method that allows a cloud system to privately compute the access policies for various resources (such as ads, mobile user profiles). Our main goal is to design a decentralized framework for targeted ads, which enables private delivery of ads to users whose behavioral profiles accurately match the presented ads, defined by the ad system. We implement a POC of our proposed framework i.e. a Bespoke Miner and experimentally evaluate various components of Blockchain-based in-app advertising system, implementing various critical components; such as, evaluating user profiles, implementing access policies, encryption and decryption of users' profiles. We observe that the processing delay for traversing policies of various tree sizes, the encryption/decryption time of user profiling with various key-sizes and user profiles of various interests evaluates to an acceptable amount of processing time as that of the currently implemented ad systems.