An on-demand mobile advertising system that protects source privacy using interest aggregation

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. From a privacy perspective, however, all “privacy-concerned” systems developed so far are based on either a trusted third-party model or on some generalized architecture. We propose a system for delivering location and preference-aware advertisements to mobiles with a novel architecture to preserve privacy. The main adversary in our model is the server distributing the ads trying to identify users and track them, and to a lesser extent, other peer in the wireless network. When the need for tailored ads arises, the node will form a group of nearby nodes seeking ads and will cooperate to achieve privacy. Peers combine their interests using a “shuffling” mechanism in an ad-hoc network and send them through a “primary peer” to the ad server. The result is that preferences of multiple peers are accumulated and masqueraded to request custom ads which are then distributed by the primary peer. Another mechanism is also proposed to implement the billing process without disclosing user identities.