
Mozilla engineer Martin Thomson reveals they've been collaborating with Meta 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 provides a lot of flexibility for businesses to use the system in a way that best suits their needs. Cross-device and cross-browser attribution options let businesses track users across devices and browsers, while maintaining privacy. The IPA proposal aims to ensure that all sites can benefit from these features by using the match key concept, which lets smaller businesses access the reach of larger businesses.
The blog post argues that advertising provides critical support for the web, and they've now proposed IPA to the World Wide Web Consortium's Private Advertising Technology Community Group. IPA is still a work in progress, but the blog post's authors believe it could be a valuable tool for web advertising.
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