In the last few years, Header Bidding (HB) has gained popularity among web publishers and is challenging the status quo in the ad ecosystem. Contrary to the traditional waterfall standard, HB aims to give back control of the ad inventory to publishers, increase transparency, fairness and competition among advertisers, thus, resulting in higher ad-slot prices. Although promising, little is known about this new ad-tech protocol: How does it work internally and what are the different implementations of HB? What is the performance overhead, and how does it affect the user experience? Does it, indeed, provide higher revenues to publishers than the waterfall model? Who are the dominating entities in this new protocol? To respond to all these questions and shed light on this new, buzzing ad-technology, we design and implement HBDetector: a holistic HB detection mechanism that can capture HB auctions independently of the implementation followed in a website. By running HBDetector across the top 35,000 Alexa websites, we collect and analyze a dataset of 800k auctions. Our results show that: (i) 14.28 of the top Alexa websites utilize HB. (ii) Publishers tend to collaborate mostly with a relatively low number of demand partners, which are already big players in waterfall standard, (iii) HB latency can be significantly higher than waterfall, with up to 3x latency in the median cases.
Bashir al in @cite_30 , study the diffusion of user tracking caused by RTB-based programmatic ad-auctions. Results of their study show that under specific assumptions, no less than 52 tracking companies can observe at least 91 an attempt to shed light upon Facebook's ad ecosystem, Andreou al in @cite_4 investigate the level of transparency provided by the mechanisms Why am I seeing this?'' and Ad Preferences Page. The authors built a browser extension to collect Facebook ads and information extracted from these two mechanisms before performing their own ad campaigns and target users that used their browser extension. They show that ad explanations are often incomplete and misleading. @cite_23 , the authors aim to enhance the transparency in ad ecosystem with regards to information sharing, by developing a content agnostic methodology to detect client- and server- side flows of information between ad exchanges and leveraging retargeted ads. By using crawled data, the authors collected 35.4k ad impressions and identified 4 different kinds of information sharing behavior between ad exchanges.
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_23
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Numerous surveys have shown that Web users are concerned about the loss of privacy associated with online tracking. Alarmingly, these surveys also reveal that people are also unaware of the amount of data sharing that occurs between ad exchanges, and thus underestimate the privacy risks associated with online tracking. In reality, the modern ad ecosystem is fueled by a flow of user data between trackers and ad exchanges. Although recent work has shown that ad exchanges routinely perform cookie matching with other exchanges, these studies are based on brittle heuristics that cannot detect all forms of information sharing, especially under adversarial conditions. In this study, we develop a methodology that is able to detect client- and server-side flows of information between arbitrary ad exchanges. Our key insight is to leverage retargeted ads as a tool for identifying information flows. Intuitively, our methodology works because it relies on the semantics of how exchanges serve ads, rather than focusing on specific cookie matching mechanisms. Using crawled data on 35,448 ad impressions, we show that our methodology can successfully categorize four different kinds of information sharing behavior between ad exchanges, including cases where existing heuristic methods fail. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings and methodologies can be leveraged to give users more control over what kind of ads they see and how their information is shared between ad exchanges. Targeted advertising has been subject to many privacy complaints from both users and policy makers. Despite this attention, users still have little understanding of what data the advertising platforms have about them and why they are shown particular ads. To address such concerns, Facebook recently introduced two transparency mechanisms: a "Why am I seeing this?" button that provides users with an explanation of why they were shown a particular ad (ad explanations), and an Ad Preferences Page that provides users with a list of attributes Facebook has inferred about them and how (data explanations). In this paper, we investigate the level of transparency provided by these two mechanisms. We first define a number of key properties of explanations and then evaluate empirically whether Facebook's explanations satisfy them. For our experiments, we develop a browser extension that collects the ads users receive every time they browse Facebook, their respective explanations, and the attributes listed on the Ad Preferences Page; we then use controlled experiments where we create our own ad campaigns and target the users that installed our extension. Our results show that ad explanations are often incomplete and sometimes misleading while data explanations are often incomplete and vague. Taken together, our findings have significant implications for users, policy makers, and regulators as social media advertising services mature. Online advertising is progressively moving towards a programmatic model in which ads are matched to actual interests of individuals collected as they browse the web. Letting the huge debate around privacy aside, a very important question in this area, for which little is known, is: How much do advertisers pay to reach an individual? In this study, we develop a first of its kind methodology for computing exactly that - the price paid for a web user by the ad ecosystem - and we do that in real time. Our approach is based on tapping on the Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocol to collect cleartext and encrypted prices for winning bids paid by advertisers in order to place targeted ads. Our main technical contribution is a method for tallying winning bids even when they are encrypted. We achieve this by training a model using as ground truth prices obtained by running our own "probe" ad-campaigns. We design our methodology through a browser extension and a back-end server that provides it with fresh models for encrypted bids. We validate our methodology using a one year long trace of 1600 mobile users and demonstrate that it can estimate a user's advertising worth with more than 82 accuracy.