Pay-per-tracking: A collaborative masking model for web browsing

Abstract

Web tracking is the key enabling technology of modern online advertising and, at the same time, the source of serious privacy concerns. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of a variety of technologies whose main goal is to address these concerns. However, ad blockers and anti-trackers eliminate all forms of tracking and advertising and therefore fail to reconcile user privacy and the current Internet business model.In this paper, we propose a new tracking paradigm that aims at returning control to users over tracking and advertising, and allowing them to participate in the monetization of their browsing data. The proposed paradigm breaks with the current barter model of exchanging privacy for services and, at the same time, it may preserve the Internet economic model where content is paid from advertisement revenue. We have designed a system architecture that implements this model in practice, and optimizes the exchange of privacy for money. Our ultimate aim is to strike a better balance between user privacy and the economic model that sustains the Web, and thus overcome the deadlock caused by the ad blocking wars. Experimental results with real browsing data demonstrate the suitability and feasibility of our approach.