Privacy-preserving targeted online advertising

Abstract

Preserving privacy of the user data is one of the important requirements in several practical applications. In recent times, the targeted advertisement is found a potential business model that the services provider can use it for revenue growth. As the advertising server (ad-server) tracks the user's activity through the user's browsing history or through the user's mobile application feature for future purposes, the privacy of user's data could fall in hand of many parties without the knowledge of the user. In this paper, a scheme for privacy preserving targeted online advertisement is presented. The proposed scheme uses homomorphic encryption aiming at extracting keywords from web pages in real-time when a user is browsing web pages. A user can avail the services privately from the ad-server by perform the computation on encrypted data stored in the server. The proposed scheme is compared with some related schemes and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme is efficient and practical