TYPES - Towards transparency and privacy in the online advertising business

Introduction

TYPES (Towards transparency and privacy in the online advertising business) plans to demonstrate solutions that protect individuals’ privacy while empowering the users to control how their data is used by service providers for advertising purposes. At the same time, TYPES will make it easier to verify whether users’ online rights are respected and if personal data is exchanged for a reasonable value-added to users.

Online advertising generated in 2013 $42B worth of revenue and more than 3.4 million direct and indirect jobs in Europe in 2012 alone. It supports some of the most important Internet services such as search, social media and user generated content sites. However, the lack of transparency regarding tracking techniques and the type of information companies collect about users is creating increasing concerns in society. Software tools for implementing total mitigation (e.g., ad blocker or cookies blocker) have been released to block any transfer of information from end users towards the online advertising ecosystem. A massive adoption of these tools by end users may cause disruptions in the digital economy by affecting the online advertising sector and leading to consequences such as losing of a large number of employments.
TYPES aims to cope with this challenge by defining, implementing, and validating in pre-market status a holistic framework of technologies and tools that guarantees both transparency and privacy preservation, gives the end user control upon the amount of information he/she is willing to share, and defines privacy-by-design solutions.

Who is the project designed for?

TYPES will demonstrate solutions that protect user’s privacy while empowering them to control how their data is used by service providers for advertising purposes. At the same time, TYPES will make it easier to verify whether users’ online rights are respected and if personal data is exchanged for a reasonable value-added to users.

In particular, TYPES tools should enable the end user:

• to configure the privacy settings so that only the information allowed by the end-user is collected by online advertising platforms;
• to understand the flow of their information within the online advertising ecosystem and how it is being used;
• to detect episodes of information collection occurring without consent and identify the offender;
• to know the value of their data

How will your project benefit the end-user?

• Benefit for Users - The tools implemented by TYPES are going to let users define their privacy settings with higher granularity what would help them to still receive ads and offers of their interest but filtering any undesired leakage of information.
• Benefits and Competitive Advantage for Over The Top Service Providers (OTT SPs) - Over The Top Service Providers (OTT SPs) (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yahoo) will be able to differentiate themselves and gain users trust by showing transparency towards the users on how their data is treated. In this respect, the adoption of TYPES tools by OTT SPs will potentially bring them even more information to analyze since users will stop using “all-or-nothing” mitigation tools and instead use fine-grained privacy safeguarding with a controllable disclosure level that will feed that privacy preserving data broker solutions. OTT SPs can benefit by adopting TYPES tools in order to increase their level of data protection compliance in a user transparent manner.
• Benefits and Competitive Advantage for Telecom Operators - Privacy-oriented services delivered via application layer proxies can increase telecom operators’ reputation (and help differentiating them resulting in an increased market share) and revenues (if offered as an opt-in paid service or as a bundle into premium plans).
• Benefits and Competitive Advantage for Equipment and Software Vendors - Types will provide answers to worldwide societal changes with their product portfolio by privacy-preserving solutions that deal with traffic optimization.