Using cooperation among peers and interest mixing to protect privacy in targeted mobile advertisement

Organizations are starting to realize the significant value of advertising on mobile devices, and a number of systems have been developed to exploit this opportunity. We propose a system for delivering location and preference-aware advertisements to vehicles and to mobile devices using a novel architecture for preserving privacy. Our model assumes the main adversary is the server distributing the ads trying to identify users and track them. It also considers other peers in the network as potential threats who may disclose information to third parties. When a node wants an ad, it forms a group of nearby nodes seeking ads and willing to cooperate to achieve privacy. Peers combine their interests using a mixing mechanism using an ad-hoc network and send them through a primary peer to the ad server. In this way, preferences are masqueraded to request custom ads which are then distributed by the primary peer. Another mechanism is proposed to implement the billing process without disclosing user identities.