Mozilla and Meta (Formerly Facebook) Propose New Privacy-Preserving Ad Technology

Mozilla engineer Martin Thomson reveals they've been collaborating with Meta (formerly Facebook) on new technology that can measure 'conversions' from advertising while still preserving privacy.

The proposed new technology is called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA.
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.

'Advertising provides critical support for the Web,' the blog post argues — and they've now proposed IPA to the World Wide Web Consortium's dedicated Private Advertising Technology Community Group, while calling their idea 'still a work in progress.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.