PROTA: A Privacy-pReserving prOtocol for real-time Targeted Advertising

With the widespread use of Internet, online advertising, as a newly emerged way of delivering advertisements, has become the focus of attention. Compared with traditional ways of advertising, real-time targeted online advertising is much more efficient and profitable, taking the advantage of abundant online users´ profiles. Advertisements can be delivered to potential users who are actually interested in the ad content, which improves the accuracy of advertising, and thus potentially increases advertisers´ profits. However, targeted advertising makes use of online users´ personal profiles, which raises significant privacy concerns since personal profiles may contain sensitive information. It is interesting but challenging to design a privacy-preserving protocol, which allows advertising platform to effectively deliver ads to interested users, while protecting the users´ private information. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-pReserving prOtocol for real-time Targeted Advertising (PROTA). We theoretically prove the privacy properties of PROTA, and show that the system requirements are satisfied. Evaluations are also conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of PROTA.