Titre :

Marketing to Children Through Online Targeted Advertising: Targeting Mechanisms and Legal Aspects

Auteur(s) :

Medjkoune, Tinhinane [Auteur]
Goga, Oana [Auteur]
Laboratoire d'informatique de l'École polytechnique [Palaiseau] [LIX]
Analyse et traitement de données complexes à grande échelle [CEDAR]
Sénéchal, Juliette [Auteur]
Centre de Recherche Droits et Perspectives du droit (CRDP) - ULR 4487

Titre de la manifestation scientifique :

The 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Ville :

Copenhague

Pays :

Danemark

Date de début de la manifestation scientifique :

2023-11-26

Éditeur :

ACM

Date de publication :

2023-11

Discipline(s) HAL :

Sciences de l'Homme et Société/Droit

Résumé en anglais : [en]

Many researchers and organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, have raised awareness of the dangers of advertisements targeted at children. While most existing laws only regulate ads on television that may reach children, ...
Lire la suite >Many researchers and organizations, such as WHO and UNICEF, have raised awareness of the dangers of advertisements targeted at children. While most existing laws only regulate ads on television that may reach children, lawmakers have been working on extending regulations to online advertising and, for example, forbid (e.g., the DSA) or restrict (e.g., the COPPA) advertising based on profiling to children. At first sight, ad platforms such as Google seem to protect children by not allowing advertisers to target their ads to users that are less than 18 years old. However, this paper shows that other targeting features can be exploited to reach children. For example, on YouTube, advertisers can target their ads to users watching a particular video through placement-based targeting, a form of contextual targeting. Hence, advertisers can target children by simply placing their ads in children-focused videos. Through a series of ad experiments, we show that placement-based targeting is possible on children-focused videos and, hence, enables marketing to children. In addition, our ad experiments show that advertisers can use targeting based on profiling (e.g., interest, location, behavior) in combination with placement-based advertising on children-focused videos. We discuss the lawfulness of these two practices with respect to DSA and COPPA. Finally, we investigate to which extent real-world advertisers are employing placement-based targeting to reach children with ads on YouTube. We propose a measurement methodology consisting of building a Chrome extension able to capture ads and instrumenting six browser profiles to watch children-focused videos. Our results show that 7% of ads that appear in the children-focused videos we test use placement-based targeting. Hence, targeting children with ads on YouTube is not only hypothetically possible but also occurs in practice. We believe that the current legal and technical solutions are not enough to protect children from harm due to online advertising. A straightforward solution would be to forbid placement-based advertising on children-focused content.Lire moins >

Langue :

Anglais

Comité de lecture :

Oui

Audience :

Internationale

Vulgarisation :

Non

Établissement(s) :

Université de Lille

Collections :

• Centre de Recherche Droits et Perspectives du droit (CRDP) - ULR 4487

Équipe(s) de recherche :

L’Équipe René Demogue

Date de dépôt :

2023-11-27T09:06:24Z
2023-11-28T10:27:22Z
2023-11-28T10:43:03Z
2024-02-09T16:20:05Z