What Twitter Knows: Characterizing Ad Targeting Practices, User Perceptions, and Ad Explanations Through Users’ Own Twitter Data
What Twitter Knows: Characterizing Ad Targeting Practices, User Perceptions, and Ad Explanations Through Users’ Own Twitter Data Miranda Wei4, Madison Stamos, Sophie Veys, Nathan Reitinger?, Justin Goodman? , Margot Herman, Dorota Filipczuky, Ben Weinshel, Michelle L. Mazurek?, Blase Ur University of Chicago, ?University of Maryland, yUniversity of Southampton, 4University of Chicago and University of Washington Abstract Many researchers have studied targeted advertising, largely Although targeted advertising has drawn signifcant attention focusing on coarse demographic or interest-based target- from privacy researchers, many critical empirical questions ing. However, advertising platforms like Twitter [63] and remain. In particular, only a few of the dozens of targeting Google [27] offer dozens of targeting mechanisms that are mechanisms used by major advertising platforms are well far more precise and leverage data provided by users (e.g., understood, and studies examining users’ perceptions of ad Twitter accounts followed), data inferred by the platform (e.g., targeting often rely on hypothetical situations. Further, it is potential future purchases), and data provided by advertisers unclear how well existing transparency mechanisms, from (e.g., PII-indexed lists of current customers). Further, because data-access rights to ad explanations, actually serve the users the detailed contents and provenance of information in users’ they are intended for. To develop a deeper understanding of advertising profles are rarely available, prior work focuses the current targeting advertising ecosystem, this paper en- heavily on abstract opinions about hypothetical scenarios. gages 231 participants’ own Twitter data, containing ads they We leverage data subjects’ right of access to data collected were shown and the associated targeting criteria, for measure- about them (recently strengthened by laws like GDPR and ment and user study.
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