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Online Advertising Under Internet Censorship

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Online Advertising Under Internet Censorship Online Advertising under Internet Censorship Hira Javaid Hafiz Kamran Khalil LUMS, Pakistan LUMS, Pakistan Zartash Afzal Uzmi Ihsan Ayyub Qazi LUMS, Pakistan LUMS, Pakistan ABSTRACT the censorship region, thus masking the true user location. Online advertising plays a critical role in enabling the free As a result, users see irrelevant ads (e.g., ads in a language Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. How- they do not understand or ads for products unavailable in 1 ever, the rise in internet censorship events globally poses their region). This frustrates the end-user , reduces the click an economic threat to the advertising ecosystem. This paper through rates, and disrupts the ad campaign, causing a loss of studies this interplay and presents ADVENTION, a system that revenue to publishers and advertisers. provides censorship circumvention while serving relevant ads. This work attempts to explore the adverse impact of cen- ADVENTION leverages the observation that ad systems are sorship circumvention on the relevance of advertisements and usually hosted on domains that are different from the pub- how to alleviate such impact. In particular, we ask, “How can lisher domains and are almost always uncensored. Taking cue we design censorship circumvention systems that allow ad- from this, ADVENTION fetches ads via the direct, uncensored, vertisers to serve geographically relevant ads to users while channel between users and the ad system. Preliminary results retaining circumvention effectiveness?” To this end, (a) we show that ADVENTION not only offers high ad relevance com- conduct an exploratory measurement study to understand how pared to other popular relay-based circumvention tools, it also ads are impacted by incorrect user location information and offers smaller page load times. quantify the decrease in ad relevance, and (b) present the initial design of ADVENTION, a system that exposes correct 1 INTRODUCTION user location information to advertisers while still allowing relay-based circumvention of internet censorship. Online advertising revenues are projected to reach $83 billion ADVENTION leverages the observation that the ads served in 2017, an increase of 40% since 2015, and now accounting by advertising systems are hosted on domains that are dif- for the largest share of the advertising market, surpassing ferent from the publisher domains and are almost always both print and TV advertising [1]. Online advertising plays uncensored to avoid potential collateral damage2. Based on a critical role in fueling the “free” Web and its growth can this observation, ADVENTION fetches ads through the (un- be attributed both to increase in internet users and the abil- censored) direct path to the advertisement system—to mimic ity to individually customize advertisements to users. While normal ad requests that are sent without routing through a targeted advertising—driven by collecting information about relay. We show that such an approach also leads to smaller a user’s digital habits, locality, and demographics [8, 12]— page load times (PLTs) and hence improved user experience has raised concerns about user privacy and surveillance, it as ad requests tend to get served faster over the direct channel. also offers a number of consumer benefits (e.g., seeing more While ADVENTION allows users to circumvent censorship, interesting or relevant ads). the publisher—accessed over the relayed path—still sees in- With internet censorship events on the rise and over 70 correct user location. The publisher may then generate irrele- countries filtering Web content [13, 15], the online advertising vant content3, thus passing incorrect publisher context to the ecosystem faces a serious challenge. The growing use of cen- ad service, leading to irrelevant ads. To address this challenge, sorship circumvention tools, such as Tor [10], Lantern [22], ADVENTION allows the possibility of improving publisher Hotspot Shield, and uProxy [34], implies that advertisers do context by intelligent relay selection (IRS) via which requests not infer the correct user location information to generate ads to publishers are routed. as these tools typically rely on proxy relays located outside We evaluate ADVENTION for a range of popular websites Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for including both censored and uncensored websites in the re- personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not gion of our experimental study. Our results show a substantial made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear loss in ad relevance when user traffic is routed via relays, this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with as is the current practice with most common circumvention credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request 1This may also incent more users to employ ad blockers [25]. permissions from [email protected]. 2Authorities rarely, if ever, block ad system domains as it would cause HotNets-XVI, November 30–December 1, 2017, Palo Alto, CA, USA blocking of ads displayed on scores of popular publishers. For example, © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. Google’s DoubleClick is used by 1,843,854 publishers and PubMatic is used ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5569-8/17/11. $15.00 by 215,046 publishers [11, 29]. https://doi.org/10.1145/3152434.3152455 3Many popular publishers offer region-specific content. tools [10, 22, 26, 32, 34]. ADVENTION provides significant 2 BACKGROUND improvements in fetching relevant ads, with further benefits Ad Classification and Targeting. Targeted advertising is of- when it employs IRS. From our experimental study, we also ten driven by: (i) publisher page context (e.g., language and demonstrate that compared to commonly-used tools for cir- keywords) to serve contextual ads, (ii) user profile and brows- cumvention (e.g., Tor and static proxies), ADVENTION shows ing history for behavioral ads, or (iii) user location to de- improvement in PLTs across a variety of popular websites, liver geo-targeted ads. We only consider these ‘dynamic’ ads, thus providing a deployment incentive for end-users. served on-the-fly via ad systems5 and real-time bidding [7]. ADVENTION keeps the users interested (lower PLTs and Profile ads such as those served over online social networks relevant ads) and enables effective ad campaigns (relevant ads largely remain relevant even with the use of a relay, and are with high click-through rates). The mechanism behind AD- not interesting from the point of view of this work. VENTION is powerful yet simple to implement as a browser Information Flow in Serving Ads. On receiving a page re- extension, for example by making use of proxy automatic quest from a client, the publisher sends back the webpage configuration (PAC) files [27] or other similar configurations. along with an embedded ad tag, which contains the page ADVENTION’s use of the direct path for routing ad re- context. The client browser, behind the scenes, forwards the quests raises three challenges. First, it can make easier for ad tag to the ad server which may also infer user profile censors to block traffic by inspecting the HTTP referer field and browsing history (via cookies) and location (via geo- of ad requests. Through measurements of Alexa top 500 web- mapping). The ad server then uses the available information sites, we find that over 82% ad requests are sent over HTTPS, (e.g., user location, user profile, or publisher context) to serve which encrypts the referer field. This prevents the censor from geo-targeted, behavioral, or contextual ads. This information blocking most traffic based on this 4field . Second, if censors flow usually allows relevant ads to be served. collude with ad systems, they can potentially block user traf- fic. However, this may be less likely in case of popular ad Information Flow with Relays. When a user routes a con- servers (e.g., DoubleClick and PubMatic) that are typically nection via circumvention relays, incorrect inference of user hosted in uncensored regions and serve majority of publisher location can cause the ad server to serve irrelevant ads. This websites. Finally, exposing user location information to ad has two important consequences: (1) it degrades user experi- servers raises potential user privacy and anonymity concerns. ence as users prefer relevant, targeted ads over random, untar- We argue that for users circumventing censorship, this may geted ads [9, 35] and (2) it disrupts the ad campaign, causing a loss of revenue to advertisers, ad servers, and publishers. be less of a concern. Furthermore, ADVENTION focuses on circumvention rather than provisioning anonymous commu- With a global rise in internet censorship [15] and the use of nication, in line with many popular circumvention tools such circumvention relays [26], the advertisement ecosystem may as Lantern, Hotspot Shield, uProxy, and static proxies. face a large economic impact. We summarize our contributions in this work as follows: 3 A MEASUREMENT STUDY • We quantify via an extensive measurement study the de- In this section, we quantify the decrease in ad relevance due crease in ad relevance when users employ relay-based to circumvention tools by conducting a measurement study. censorship circumvention. We collect ads from a range of websites and divide them into • We present the design and implementation of ADVEN- two sets, C and U. Websites in set C were censored while TION, a system for serving relevant ads while retaining those in U were not censored in the region of evaluation. The circumvention effectiveness, with a provision for IRS. set U was taken from Alexa top 500 websites [3]. • A preliminary evaluation of ADVENTION performance, compared to other circumvention tools, which captures: 3.1 Methodology (i) increase in ad relevance, (ii) additional increase in We use Selenium [31] with Firefox to automate our experi- ad relevance when ADVENTION uses IRS, and (iii) ments and employ Tor as a circumvention tool.
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