Chapter 2
Security/Advertising
Lecture looking at how we assess approaches like tools, policies, practices, and regulations from the perspective of security.
Slides
Required Reading
- Adblocking: How About Nah? by Cory Doctorow
- Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO: AdBlock Plus is an extortion-based business by Frederic Lardinois
News Links
- China-based SMS Phishing Triad Pivots to Banks
- META: Unauthorized Experiment on CMV Involving AI-generated Comments
Learning Outcomes
Topics
- CIAAA
- Threat models
- How websites are built
- Man-in-the-middle - brief intro
Understand
- Security requires specification to reason about
- How websites are dynamically built
- Advertising from a security perspective
- A single web connection has many groups involved
Apply
- Block third party content activity
- What does “secure advertising” mean to you?
- What are key actors in your threat model regarding advertising?
Referenced in lecture
- Z. Pooranian, M. Conti, H. Haddadi and R. Tafazolli, “Online Advertising Security: Issues, Taxonomy, and Future Directions,” in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 2494-2524, Fourthquarter 2021, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2021.3118271.
Additional Resources
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Helen Nissenbaum on Ad Nauseum, resistance through obfuscation, and weapons of the weak
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Nouwens, Midas, et al. “A Cross-Country Analysis of GDPR Cookie Banners and Flexible Methods for Scraping Them.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19655 (2025).
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Too Much Knowledge? Security Beliefs and Protective Behaviors Among United States Internet Users by Rick Wash and Emilee Rader