https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/

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Mozilla

Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising

calendar February 8, 2022
author Martin Thomson

Advertising provides critical support for the Web. We've been looking
to apply privacy preserving advertising technology to the attribution
problem, so that advertisers can get answers to important questions
without harming privacy.

Attribution is how advertisers know if their advertising campaigns
are working. Attribution generates metrics that allow advertisers to
understand how their advertising campaigns are performing. Related
measurement techniques also help publishers understand how they are
helping advertisers. Though attribution is crucial to advertising,
current attribution practices have terrible privacy properties.

For the last few months we have been working with a team from Meta
(formerly Facebook) on a new proposal that aims to enable conversion
measurement - or attribution - for advertising called Interoperable
Private Attribution, or IPA.

IPA aims to provide advertisers with the ability to perform
attribution while providing strong privacy guarantees. IPA has two
key privacy-preserving features. First, it uses Multi-Party
Computation (MPC) to avoid allowing any single entity -- websites,
browser makers, or advertisers -- to learn about user behavior.
Mozilla has some experience with MPC systems as we've deployed Prio
for privacy-preserving telemetry. Second, it is an aggregated system,
which means that it produces results that cannot be linked to
individual users. Together these features mean that IPA cannot be
used to track or profile users.

IPA is designed to provide a lot of flexibility for advertising
businesses in terms of how they use the system. Cross-device and
cross-browser attribution options in IPA enable new and more robust
attribution capabilities, while maintaining privacy. The IPA proposal
aims to ensure that all sites benefit from these features with the
match key concept, which allows smaller players to access the greater
reach of entities to cross-device attribution.

Together with our co-authors from Meta, we've recently proposed IPA
to the Private Advertising Technology Community Group, or PATCG.
PATCG is a group in the W3C specifically formed to work on improving
advertising without compromising on privacy.

IPA is promising, but it is still a work in progress. We are still
improving it and so welcome feedback on this idea and invite people
to contribute to the discussion in PATCG. We hope this contribution
will help make privacy-preserving attribution a reality.

The IPA overview contains more details on the proposal.

For more on this:

Building a more privacy-preserving ads-based ecosystem

The future of ads and privacy

Privacy analysis of FLoC

Mozilla responds to the UK CMA consultation on Google's commitments
on the Chrome Privacy Sandbox

Privacy analysis of SWAN.community and Unified ID 2.0

Analysis of Google's Privacy Budget proposal

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