Targeted Advertising on the Handset: Privacy and Security Challenges

Online advertising is currently a rich source of revenue for many Internet giants. With the ever-increasing number of smart phones, there is a fertile market for personalised and localised advertising. A key benefit of using mobile phones is to take advantage of the significant amount of information on phones – such as locations of interest to the user – in order to provide personalised advertisements. Preservation of user privacy, however, is essential for successful deployment of such a system. In this chapter we provide an overview of existing advertising systems and privacy concerns on mobile phones, in addition to a system, MobiAd, which includes protocols for scalable local advertisement download and privacy-aware click report dissemination. In the final section of this chapter we describe some of the security mechanisms used in detecting click-through fraud, and techniques that can be used to ensure that the extra privacy protections of MobiAd are not abused to defraud advertisers.