CAPPA: Context Aware Privacy Protecting Advertising - An Extension to CLOPRO Framework

Advent of 4G networks, IPV6 and increased number of subscribers to these, has triggered many free applications that are easy to install on smart mobile devices, a primary computing device for many. The free application markets are sustainable as revenue model for most of these service providers is through profiling of users and pushing of the advertisements to the users. This imposes a serious threat to user´s privacy. Most of the existing solutions starve the developers of their revenue by falsifying / altering the information of the users. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by extending our integrated Context Cloaking Privacy Protection framework (CLOPRO) that achieves identity privacy, location privacy, and query privacy without depriving the service provider of sustainable revenue generated through the use of the Context Aware Privacy Preserving Advertising (CAPPA). The CLOPRO framework has been shown to provide privacy to the user while using location based services. In this paper we demonstrate how this framework can be extended to deliver the advertisements / coupons based on users interests, specified at the time of registration, and the current context of the user without revealing these details to the service provider. The original service requests of the registered users are modified by the CLOPRO framework using concepts of clustering and abstraction. The results are filtered to deliver the relevant information to the user. Since the advertisements received are relevant to the user, the click rate is likely to increase ensuring increased revenue for service provider. The proposed framework has O(n) complexity.