Folk Models of Online Behavioral Advertising

Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) is pervasive on the Internet. While there is a line of empirical research that studies Internet users' attitudes and privacy preferences of OBA, little is known about their actual understandings of how OBA works. This is an important question to answer because people often draw on their understanding to make decisions. Through a qualitative study conducted in an iterative manner, we identify four "folk models" held by our participants about how OBA works and show how these models are either incomplete or inaccurate in representing common OBA practices. We discuss how privacy tools can be designed to consider these folk models. In addition, most of our participants felt that the information being tracked is more important than who the web trackers are. This suggests the potential for an information-based blocking scheme rather than a tracker-based blocking scheme used by most existing ad-blocking tools.