SINBAD: Saliency-informed detection of breakage caused by ad blocking

TL;DR

SINBAD is an automated tool that detects website breakage caused by ad-blocking filters, including dynamic and style-related issues, improving accuracy and aiding filter maintainers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining user reports, web saliency, and subtree analysis for more precise breakage detection in ad-blocking filters.

Findings

20% improvement over state-of-the-art detection accuracy

First to detect dynamic breakage and style-related filter issues

Utilizes user-reported data for high-quality training

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing blocking tools based on filter-list rules tend to break legitimate functionality. Filter-list maintainers could benefit from automated breakage detection tools that allow them to proactively fix problematic rules before deploying them to millions of users. We introduce SINBAD, an automated breakage detector that improves the accuracy over the state of the art by 20%, and is the first to detect dynamic breakage and breakage caused by style-oriented filter rules. The success of SINBAD is rooted in three innovations: (1) the use of user-reported breakage issues in forums that enable the creation of a high-quality dataset for training in which only breakage that users perceive as an issue is included; (2) the use of 'web saliency' to automatically identify user-relevant regions of a website on which to prioritize automated interactions aimed at triggering breakage; and (3) the analysis of webpages via subtrees which enables fine-grained identification of problematic filter rules.