AdSelector: A Privacy-Preserving Advertisement Selection Mechanism for Mobile Devices

Targeted mobile advertising (TMA) enables organizations to tailor advertisements to specific consumers by analysing the personal information collected from consumers' mobile devices. Although TMA offers great benefits to advertisers, the privacy concerns associated with it may reduce the advertising effectiveness. It follows that there is a need for an advertisement selection mechanism that can support the existing TMA business model in a manner that takes into account consumers' privacy concerns. We present such an ad selection mechanism that has the potential to provide benefits to both consumers and advertisers. The mechanism is novel in its combination of a user subscription mechanism, a two-stage ad selection process, and the application of a trustworthy billing system. In particular, (i) the user subscription mechanism helps users to identify their interests and subscribe to desirable categories of ads; (ii) the two-stage ad selection process ensures that ad servers can only obtain coarse-grained user profiles, with fine-grained user profiles stored and used only on the mobile devices and (iii) the trustworthy billing system helps to report ad-clicks without revealing users' identities and assists in detecting click-fraud attacks. The performance of the mechanism is evaluated in the context of a prototype privacy-preserving TMA framework.