SINBAD: Saliency-informed detection of breakage caused by ad blocking
This addresses the issue for filter-list maintainers and users by reducing functionality breakage, though it is an incremental improvement in detection methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automated detection of breakage caused by ad-blocking filter lists, improving accuracy by 20% over the state of the art and enabling detection of dynamic and style-oriented breakage.
Privacy-enhancing blocking tools based on filter-list rules tend to break legitimate functionality. Filter-list maintainers could benefit from automated breakage detection tools that allow them to proactively fix problematic rules before deploying them to millions of users. We introduce SINBAD, an automated breakage detector that improves the accuracy over the state of the art by 20%, and is the first to detect dynamic breakage and breakage caused by style-oriented filter rules. The success of SINBAD is rooted in three innovations: (1) the use of user-reported breakage issues in forums that enable the creation of a high-quality dataset for training in which only breakage that users perceive as an issue is included; (2) the use of 'web saliency' to automatically identify user-relevant regions of a website on which to prioritize automated interactions aimed at triggering breakage; and (3) the analysis of webpages via subtrees which enables fine-grained identification of problematic filter rules.