Privacy Preserving Secure Online Advertising

AbstractOnline advertisement has generated 48.09 billion dollars in 2013 (IAB, 2014) in US sponsoring most of the free services and content on the Internet today. However, problems stemming from the rivalry to get a share of this high revenue can disrupt the system jeopardizing online privacy and security. There have been a lot of malicious cases where fraudsters have deployed methods such as malware or phishing to get a share from the market thus compromising the security of end users and thus harming the end users. In addition to this, tracking methods deployed to increase the targeting accuracy of the advertisements reveals a lot of private information about the users without any permission from them. The rules around collection and usage of personal data is ambiguous and can be harmful in various ways such when it is shared with third parties. In response to these threats, end users have been inclining to use ad-avoidance tools which disable user tracking or block ad requests completely. This situation harms the Internet ecosystem which heavily relies on online advertising. To remedy this problem, Comodo is developing secure and privacy-friendly advertising solutions around its “trusted ads” concept using methods such as anonymous user tracking, safe ad content delivery and continuous ad inspection (malware/virus scanning). These methods guarantee secure advertisements delivery to end users, while preserving effectiveness of ad delivery. The beta versions of the products have been deployed and tested in real life for 6 months. Based on our observations, users are concerned about their privacy; but they also want customized content according to their needs and make money from ads as long as it is not harmful to them. Based on this data, we are willing to expand our system and make it one of the major ad-delivery networks