Targeted Ads Analysis: What are The most Targeted Personas?

In recent years, the handling of personal information in web advertisements have been regulated and updated frequently. The algorithms for targeted advertisements delivered based on users’ browsing history and search results is opaque, and hence there is a concern of invasion of privacy. Therefore, we have four research questions as a survey of targeted advertisements by cookie information. Which personas are most likely to be targeted? Which websites are most frequently targeted? How long are they displayed? Is automatic observation possible? To answer these questions, we developed a system that obtains automatically transitions websites and targeted advertisement URLs for each persona using Selenium, a portable framework. We report the development of the system and the results of our experiment.