Dear CIS Community,
This Monday (April 20, 4:30-5:30pm HST) Stacia Garlach will discuss her dissertation progress at our 720 seminar. Stacia is working on data analysis for her research on the usability of tools for setting preferences about targeted online advertising. She’ll talk about the winding road from proposal defense to final defense—which she’s still on.
Dissertation title: Usability of online behavioral advertising preference-setting tools in the mobile environment: Ad Choices and Facebook Ad Preferences
Abstract
Online behavioral advertising (OBA) is the practice of targeting consumers with ads based on data collected by tracking their online activities over time and across their devices. The FTC has raised concerns about how OBA practices affect consumers’ privacy, especially in the mobile environment with the myriad tracking technologies mobile devices afford. This research builds upon previous work that explored consumers’ comprehension of and attitudes toward OBA practices in general, and the online advertising industry’s notice-and-choice mechanisms in particular. It consists of two qualitative user studies that explored OBA preference-setting tools in the mobile environment: AdChoices and Facebook Ad Preferences. Both studies employ hands-on usability research on mobile devices to further understand users’ mental models of what the tools do and how they function.
Stacia Garlach is a CIS student whose research explores online advertising and its implications on consumer data privacy, from both a communication policy perspective (regulatory framework), and a human computer interaction perspective (design aspects of usable privacy and security). She has more than 20 years’ professional experience in marketing communication, mostly for non-profit organizations. She currently works at the UH Foundation as a graphic designer.