BC-PUS: A Proposed Blockchain-Based Private User-Driven Mobile Advertising System

Targeted advertising offers significant benefits to advertisers and in turn raises many issues, with privacy issues dominating the list. Big data analytics is the foundation of targeted advertising because it allows for the collection and processing of user data to enable the creation of user segments with varying sizes according to interests, location, or specific characteristics like age, gender, etc. In the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of individuals who are concerned about their privacy over how targeted advertising uses tracking information. Overall, the protection of the personal data of users with effective targeting is crucial for both advertising networks and mobile users. Mobile users would like to see interest-based advertisements when their data are not revealed to the outside world, such as ad networks. Hence, there is a need for such a mobile advertising system that can sustain the current business model of targeted mobile advertising (TMA) and can do so in a way that assists protect the personal information of users instead of just circumventing their privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based private user-driven mobile advertising system, which we call BC-PUS. It takes advantage of the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to control and regulate the advertising process, in addition to preserving the privacy of users. The evaluation results show that the proposed BC-PUS has the required usability and reliability. In comparison with previous studies, our proposed system adopts all the characteristics: user-driven, privacy-preservation, data-encryption, personal data protection law (PDPL) compliance, low-cost, monetary incentive, and authentication that make it a fair and reliable mobile advertising system while the previous studies guarantee only the three characteristics: user-driven, privacy-preservation, and data-encryption.