Personalized ads

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Personalized advertising, custom advertising or targeted advertising is a form to provide certain ads to the user, based on the data gathered of them. This allows to target the user with ads of products or services of the user's preferences.

How it works

Some products or services offer personalized ads via ad providers, like Google Ads. Targeted advertising works using a combination of gathered user data (that might be collected without user's consent), training data and prediction algorithms.

Some examples of data collected to provide targeted advertising consists of GPS location, age, gender, search history, ad interaction and application interactions. In some cases, ad providers allow users to opt-out from personalized ads and delete the gathered data.

Once enough data is gathered, it is processed and used to train algorithms to create a profile of the user, detecting their fingerprints, behaviors, interests and dislikes. This profile is then used to predict the user and select and deploy advertisements that might be relevant for the user.

Why it is a problem

Privacy concerns

The gathered data might belong to extremely sensitive data that could be gathered without the user's consent or notice. In the most invasive cases, the data gathered could belong to records from private conversations of the user. There's also a risk this data can be intercepted, taken, leaked or used for malicious purposes.

Manipulation

Personalized ads can be used as a more effective way to encourage the user to pay for a product or a service, even if they actually don't need it. It is possible the ads shown might be malicious, misleading or false ads, and the user could fall into them.

Data poisoning

Data poisoning is a practice done by some users as a form of protest or for privacy purposes, to prevent algorithms to profile the user. It consists of modifying on purpose the behavior in order to contaminate the advertising algorithms. This reduces the precision to correctly predict user's behavior, making harder to deploy relevant ads according to the actual user's profile.

An extension available for browsers named Adnauseam works as an ad-blocker but also as a tool to blur someone's advertising profile. It achieves this by automatically pseudo-clicking on every ad to send interaction data to the algorithms.

Examples

• Google Ads, the largest ad provider in the world, collects data from the products and services that the user uses. Then it shows personalized ads in their own products, services or third-party media that uses their ad provider service.
• Some products and services by Google that provide personalized ads are: YouTube, Google Search and Google Play Store
• Reddit shows sometimes personalized ads that look like a regular post, based on the post and community interactions in the application.
• Several mobile applications show a pop-up that asks the user to enable personalized ads. Others might force to only allow this feature in order to use the app.

See also

• Advertising overload
• Ad block
• Spyware
• Bloatware