"Exploring Transparency in Online Advertising"
Targeted online advertising is now commonplace, with search engines and online social networks employing sophisticated targeting technologies to deliver sales pitches to specific end-users. However, while these technologies can help users see more relevant advertisements, they also raise privacy and equity concerns, as such advertisements have often been found to impact the employment, housing, and credit opportunities that online users see. Through funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a University of Maryland (UMD) expert in cybersecurity and human-computer interaction is part of a multi-institutional team investigating this topic to better understand how consumers' personal information is used to generate online targeted advertisements. According to Michelle Mazurek, an associate professor of computer science and director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center, some social media platforms have recently begun to make the data used for targeted advertising more transparent to researchers and even end users. Despite these efforts, preliminary research has revealed significant flaws in the current transparency mechanisms. The NSF-funded project aims to create new data collection methods and mechanisms to make targeted advertisement transparency information more useful to researchers, journalists, civil society organizations, and end users. This article continues to discuss the NSF-funded project that aims to address privacy and equity concerns regarding targeted advertisements.