Online advertisements are an unavoidable fact of the modern web — they are embedded in and financially support the majority of content websites. However, by collecting and using data about people's browsing behaviors (i.e., tracking), and by disseminating problematic content in ads themselves (e.g., clickbait, misinformation), the online ad ecosystem creates privacy, security, and information authenticity risks for end users of the web.

The Security & Privacy Research Lab at the University of Washington has been studying these issues for over a decade, since 2011.