Abstract:
Retailers regularly target users with online ads based on their web browsing activity. The effectiveness of such ads relies on third-party brokers that maintain detailed user information, prompting privacy legislation such as “do-not-track” that would limit or ban the practice. In this talk, Ceren Budak will gauge the economic costs of such privacy policies by analyzing the anonymized web browsing histories of 14 million individuals. Through an analysis that considers the impact on advertisers, content providers and customers, she concludes that do-not-track legislation would impact, but not fundamentally fracture, the Internet economy.

Her presentation is based on joint work with Sharad Goel (Stanford University), Justin M. Rao (Microsoft Research) and Georgios Zervas (Boston University).