ABSTRACT
Google's Ad Settings shows the gender and age that Google has inferred about a web user. We compare the inferred values to the self-reported values of 501 survey participants. We find that Google often does not show an inference, but when it does, it is typically correct. We explore which usage characteristics, such as using privacy enhancing technologies, are associated with Google's accuracy, but found no significant results.
Supplemental Material
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This directory contains the data used for the following paper: Michael Carl Tschantz, Serge Egelman, Jaeyoung Choi, Nicholas Weaver, and Gerald Friedland. 2018. The Accuracy of the Demographic Inferences, Shown on Google's Ad Settings. In 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'18), October 15, 2018, Toronto, ON, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3267323.3268962 The files are as follows: - augmented-results.txt - the whole data set - 300-augmented-results.txt - just the subset of augmented-results.txt used as the exploratory data set The confirmation data set is their difference. The data sets use tabs as deliminators with one line per respondent.
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The Accuracy of the Demographic Inferences Shown on Google's Ad Settings
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