oa Enabling Online Advertising Transparency through Data Donation Methods

Advertising has historically played a major cultural role in media and society; targeted advertising based on the detailed profiling of consumers has become central to the business models of commercial digital and social media platforms. Despite their immense cultural and economic significance, the operations of these advertising systems are difficult to observe, preventing the independent, systematic study of both advertising content and how it is delivered to audiences. This paper details a novel data donation infrastructure aimed at improving the observability of both of these aspects of platform-based advertising. The infrastructure includes custom plugins developed for major web browsers to capture web-based Facebook advertising content and targeting information from individual Facebook users for large- scale offline analysis. The paper describes the technical components of the infrastructure, including the plugin(s), data storage, data processing and enrichment, and researcher dashboard. We also discuss preliminary findings from case studies conducted using the tool, the ethical considerations associated with the research, and insights for future data donation projects.