  Free content and services on the Web are often supported by ads. However,
with the proliferation of intrusive and privacy-invasive ads, a significant
proportion of users have started to use ad blockers. As existing ad blockers
are radical (they block all ads) and are not designed taking into account their
economic impact, ad-based economic model of the Web is in danger today. In this
paper, we target privacy-sensitive users and provide them with fine-grained
control over tracking. Our working assumption is that some categories of web
pages (for example, related to health, religion, etc.) are more
privacy-sensitive to users than others (education, science, etc.). Therefore,
our proposed approach consists in providing users with an option to specify the
categories of web pages that are privacy-sensitive to them and block trackers
present on such web pages only. As tracking is prevented by blocking network
connections of third-party domains, we avoid not only tracking but also
third-party ads. Since users will continue receiving ads on web pages belonging
to non-sensitive categories, our approach essentially provides a trade-off
between privacy and economy. To test the viability of our solution, we
implemented it as a Google Chrome extension, named MyTrackingChoices (available
on Chrome Web Store). Our real-world experiments with MyTrackingChoices show
that the economic impact of ad blocking exerted by privacy-sensitive users can
be significantly reduced.
