Athanasios Andreou (EURECOM), Márcio Silva (UFMG), Fabrício Benevenuto (UFMG), Oana Goga (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG), Patrick Loiseau (Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Inria, Grenoble INP, LIG & MPI-SWS), Alan Mislove (Northeastern University)

The Facebook advertising platform has been subject to a number of controversies in the past years regarding privacy violations, lack of transparency, as well as its capacity to be used by dishonest actors for discrimination or propaganda. In this study, we aim to provide a better understanding of the Facebook advertising ecosystem, focusing on how it is being used by advertisers. We first analyze the set of advertisers and then investigate how those advertisers are targeting users and customizing ads via the platform. Our analysis is based on the data we collected from over 600 real-world users via a browser extension that collects the ads our users receive when they browse their Facebook timeline, as well as the explanations for why users received these ads.

Our results reveal that users are targeted by a wide range of advertisers (e.g., from popular to niche advertisers); that a non-negligible fraction of advertisers are part of potentially sensitive categories such as news and politics, health or religion; that a significant number of advertisers employ targeting strategies that could be either invasive or opaque; and that many advertisers use a variety of targeting parameters and ad texts. Overall, our work emphasizes the need for better mechanisms to audit ads and advertisers in social media and provides an overview of the platform usage that can help move towards such mechanisms.

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Martin Degeling (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Christine Utz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Christopher Lentzsch (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Henry Hosseini (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Florian Schaub (University of Michigan), Thorsten Holz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

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On the Challenges of Geographical Avoidance for Tor

Katharina Kohls (Ruhr-University Bochum), Kai Jansen (Ruhr-University Bochum), David Rupprecht (Ruhr-University Bochum), Thorsten Holz (Ruhr-University Bochum), Christina Pöpper (New York University Abu Dhabi)

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Constructing an Adversary Solver for Equihash

Xiaofei Bai (School of Computer Science, Fudan University), Jian Gao (School of Computer Science, Fudan University), Chenglong Hu (School of Computer Science, Fudan University), Liang Zhang (School of Computer Science, Fudan University)

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Mind Your Own Business: A Longitudinal Study of Threats...

Platon Kotzias (IMDEA Software Institute, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Leyla Bilge (Symantec Research Labs), Pierre-Antoine Vervier (Symantec Research Labs), Juan Caballero (IMDEA Software Institute)

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