High-Frequency Trading For Your Private Data
New submitter fierman writes "In a work to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (ISOC NDSS'14), INRIA researchers show the privacy risks of Real-Time Bidding (PDF) and High-Frequency Trading for selling advertisement spaces. Combining Real-Time Bidding and Cookie Matching, advertisers can significantly improve their tracking and profiling capabilities. Both technologies are already prevalent on the Web. The research discusses the value of users' private data (browsing history) retrieved directly from the advertisers, leveraging an exposed information leak in RTB systems. Advertisers will pay about $0.0005 to display a targeted ad to a single user, while at the same time acquiring information about them. The research also shows evidence of price variation with users' profiles, physical location, time of day and content of visited sites."
No doubt!
I'd like bid 5$ to buy the next 1,000,000 page views served to me. That ought to buy me an ad free internet for quite a while.
If that's the market rate to throw shitty ads in my face, I'm more than willing to pay the going rate to replace them with 1x1 clear gifs for my page views. (I'll also supply hosting and bandwidth cost to serving them to me.)