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To partly address people's concerns over web tracking, Google has created the Settings webpage to provide information about and some choice over the Google creates on users. We present AdFisher, an automated tool that how user behaviors, Google's ads, and Ad Settings interact. AdFisher run browser-based experiments and analyze data using machine learning and tests. Our tool uses a rigorous experimental design and analysis to ensure the statistical soundness of our results. We use to find that the Ad Settings was opaque about some features of a's profile, that it does provide some choice on ads, and that these choices lead to seemingly discriminatory ads. In particular, we found that visiting associated with substance abuse changed the ads shown but not the page. We also found that setting the gender to female resulted in fewer instances of an ad related to high paying jobs than setting it to. We cannot determine who caused these findings due to our limited into the ad ecosystem, which includes Google, advertisers, websites, users. Nevertheless, these results can form the starting point for deeper by either the companies themselves or by regulatory bodies.
Datta et al. (Wed,) studied this question.