SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative Research: Understanding and Mitigating the Privacy and Societal Risks of Advanced Advertising Targeting and Tracking

广告现在为大多数流行的网站和互联网服务提供资金：公司经常免费提供服务，以换取在与服务互动时从用户那里收集数据。近年来，平台收集的用户数据的规模和分辨率导致平台向广告商提供的目标定位、报告、测量和跟踪机制的种类急剧增加。不幸的是，我们对这些机制的隐私和社会风险的理解没有跟上这种增长的步伐，这引发了一些科学问题，即广告商可以通过这些机制对平台用户了解多少，以及他们可能以偏见或歧视性的方式行事。因为互联网上的任何人都可以在所有这些平台上注册成为广告商--以非常低的成本获得这些机制和数据--理解它们的影响是一个迫切的需要。该项目的目标是改善所有用户的隐私，提高用户和监管机构对当今流行服务背后广泛--而且往往是隐藏的--广告生态系统的认识，以及它带来的隐私和社会风险。该项目遵循三管齐下的研究议程。第一组研究任务集中在增强隐私，解决揭示广告统计数据的问题，同时基于差异隐私领域的方法提供对用户隐私的强有力保障。第二组研究任务侧重于检测和防止歧视，解决广告平台的功能可能通过选择向哪些用户显示哪些广告而无意或故意歧视不同群体的多种方式。第三组研究任务涉及透明度和控制问题，从用户和监管机构的角度研究当前的透明度做法是否全面和真实，以及所提供的控制功能是否对广告交付具有预期的效果并与人们对隐私的期望保持一致。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Advertising now funds most of the popular web sites and internet services: companies often provide their services for free, in exchange for collecting data from their users as they interact with the service. In recent years, the scale and resolution of user data that platforms collect has led to a dramatic increase in the variety of targeting, reporting, measurement, and tracking mechanisms that platforms offer to advertisers. Unfortunately, our understanding of the privacy and societal risks of these mechanisms has not kept pace with this increase, raising scientific questions about how much advertisers can learn about platform users through these mechanisms, as well as about their potential for acting in a biased or discriminatory way. Because anyone on the Internet can sign up to be an advertiser on all of these platforms -- granting access to these mechanisms and data at very low cost -- understanding their implications is a critical need. The goal of this project is to improve privacy for all users, and raise awareness among users and regulators of the extensive -- and often hidden -- advertising ecosystem that underlies today's popular services, and the privacy and societal risks it poses.This project is following a three-pronged research agenda. The first set of research tasks centers on enhancing privacy, addressing the problem of revealing advertising statistics while providing strong guarantees of user privacy based on methods from the field of differential privacy. The second set of research tasks focuses on detecting and preventing discrimination, addressing the multitude of ways in which the advertising platforms' features could inadvertently or intentionally discriminate against different groups through the choice of which ads to display to which users. The third set of research tasks addresses issues of transparency and control, studying whether current transparency practices are comprehensive and truthful from both users' and regulators' perspectives, and whether the provided control features have the expected effects on ad delivery and align with people's expectations of privacy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.