Overprofiling

About

The online advertising ecosystem is one of the main funding sources of the internet, allowing users to get access to multiple types of services for free, from Facebook to their favorite newspaper. Most of the ads delivered are based on the user's online behavior (Online Behavioral Advertising). This way to deliver ads brought the capacity to target individuals based on their behavior. The online advertising platforms transform the user's online behavior into "interests". However, not all the interests may have a relation to their real online behavior and could be that some of them are artificially added to increase the potential audience of the ad campaigns.

With this extension, we aim to analyze the number the interests associated with your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google accounts. Also, we want to measure the level of over profiling (i.e., how many of those interests they assign you but do not represent you ) as well as to measure how frequently Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google use those interests to deliver ads. We also want to measure whether a user can recognize in which platform an ad was shown and whether or not the ad is useful to the user.

The extension also offers a dashboard where the user can visualize diverse aspects of the ads that were displayed to them.