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