Auditing Offline Data Brokers via Facebook's Advertising Platform
Open accessAbstract
Data brokers such as Acxiom and Experian are in the business of collecting and selling data on people; the data they sell is commonly used to feed marketing as well as political campaigns. Despite the ongoing privacy debate, there is still very limited visibility into data collection by data brokers. Recently, however, online advertising services such as Facebook have begun to partner with data brokers-to add additional targeting features to their platform- providing avenues to gain insight into data broker information.
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Most platforms have a review process to prevent abuse or violations of their platforms' advertising policies.
“Most platforms have a review process to prevent abuse or violations of their platforms' advertising policies[8,77].”
From Discrimination through Optimization (2019) · cites this paper as [77]
The available Abstract discusses auditing data brokers through Facebook advertising, but does not address ad-review processes. Searches for review processes, ad approval, and advertising-policy violations found no passage supporting the claim that most platforms have such a process; the accessible copy appears to contain mainly the abstract, references, and page metadata. (LLM, conf=0.72)
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Cites
Discrimination in online ad delivery
Sweeney, L. (2013) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/2447976.2447990 · Cited by 783 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
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Cited by
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Discrimination through Optimization
Ali, M., Sapiezynski, P., Bogen, M., Korolova, A., Mislove, A., & Rieke, A. (2019) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3359301 · Cited by 268 · see citing works
Self-citationProblematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits
Bandy, J. (2021) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3449148 · Cited by 193 · see citing works
Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook's ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes
Ali, M., Sapiezynski, P., Bogen, M., Korolova, A., Mislove, A., & Rieke, A. (2019) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.02095 · Cited by 72 · see citing works
Self-citationBeauvisage, T., Beuscart, J.-S., Coavoux, S., & Mellet, K. (2024) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/14614448221146174 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
“Following a long-term trend toward the automatization of data exchanges and media purchasing (McGuigan, 2019), these data circulate among actors of the programmatic advertising value chain (Venkatadri et al., 2019).”
- Authors
- Venkatadri, G., Sapiezynski, P., Redmiles, E. M., Mislove, A., Goga, O., Mazurek, M., & Gummadi, K. P.
- Affiliations
- Northeastern University (US)
- Northeastern University, USA
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Institut polytechnique de Grenoble (FR)
- Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (DE)
- Venue
- The World Wide Web Conference
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-05-13
- Pages
- 1920-1930
- OpenAlex
- W2913823566
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 14.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1322106, 1616234)
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-17, ANR-17-CE23-0014)
- H2020 European Research Council (789373)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Keywords
- data brokers, auditing, online advertising, data collection, privacy, targeted advertising, political campaigns, Experian, data transparency
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