Speaker: Eric Zeng (Georgetown University)
Title: Measuring Risks to Users' Health Privacy Posed by Third-Party Web Tracking and Targeted Advertising
Online advertising platforms may be able to infer privacy-sensitive information about people, such as their health conditions. This could lead to harms like exposure to predatory targeted advertising or unwanted disclosure of health conditions to employers or insurers. In this work, we experimentally evaluate whether online advertisers target people with health conditions. We collected the browsing histories of people with and without health conditions. We crawled their histories to simulate their browsing profiles and collected the ads that were served to them. Then, we compared the content of the ads between groups. We observed that the profiles of people who visited more health-related web pages received more health-related ads. 49.5% of health-related ads used deceptive advertising techniques. Our findings suggest that new privacy regulations and enforcement measures are needed to protect people’s health privacy from online tracking and advertising platforms.
Dr. Eric Zeng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. His research interests include usable security and privacy, consumer protection, and user safety on online platforms. His research has covered topics including: threats to health privacy from online advertising platforms, AI for cybersecurity in industrial control systems, deceptive ads and the ad platforms that enable them, and interpersonal privacy risks in home IoT. He completed a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and recently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University CyLab.