Volunteering for Targeted Advertising

Software	None, or HTML/CSS plus server-side software and DBMS
Covers	User interaction with online advertising PLUS interface design and database systems (optonal)
Skills Required	Interest how people interact with the WWW, database development
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ? Programming (?)

Brief Description

A large part of the world's economy, and some the world's biggest and most famous businesses, such as Google and Facebook, depend on surveillance capitalism. They make money by selling information about their users. These companies gather an enormous amount fo information about us, often a lot more than we realise we are revealing, or want to reveal, and sell it to companies that want to target advertising at likely customers. We don't mind targeted advertising. Many of us just don't want to be tracked. While the European Union has tried defending our rights by forcing companies to enable us to opt out of accepting tracking cookies, it is difficult to avoid accepting cookies we didn't mean to.

Is there another way? Can we avoid the tracking involved in targeted advertising, while supporting the free-with-advertising business models used by many companies providing web services? Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to figure out how a business model could work that enables companies to provide sufficiently lucrative advertising without tracking users where they don't want to be tracked. What software would be needed to make the business model work while meeting the needs of different stakeholders? What requirements would the software need to meet? What else would be needed for companies to operate using the business model?

One way this could work is by enabling users to register interests so that ads can be selected for them that are more likely to be interesting than random ads, using a voluntary and reasonably transparent process that security-conscious users are justified in feeling comfortable with. Is this a viable idea? How might it work? How might users be encouraged or incentivized to use it and keep information reasonably up-to-date in a cost-effective manner? Part of the challenge would be a usable mechanism for enabling people to be specific or vague about their needs, and matching ads appropriately.

Variant

If you want to make this the foundation of a development project, build a prototype system for collecting the information people volunteer about their preferences for advertising. This would be made a lot stronger by implementing a procedure for enabling users to be more or less specific about what they want, and matching ads to user preferences appropriately.

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