The goal of privacy is to limit and minimize the collection and sharing of personal data between business partners. However, some of the core functions of digital advertising such as ad targeting, measurement and attribution wholly rely on the ability to identify and share data on individual users. Given that digital advertising sustains the free and open internet, finding alternative ways to deliver these functions without revealing user’s personal data is key to meeting our privacy goals, and sustaining the free and open internet that so many of us have come to rely on. Today, there are advanced technologies namely encryption, differential privacy or k- anonymity, on device computing and secure multi party computation that can be readily applied to achieve this.
Over the past year, privacy-enhancing technologies have come into vogue, particularly as companies like Meta, Snowflake, Neustar, Criteo and others vocalize investments. PETs have the potential to impact much of the digital ads infrastructure that exists today. If PET use cases and integration surface area are developed in a fragmented, non-standardized manner, the cost of transition increases, and the potential for scaled, felt privacy impacts decreases. Notably, today’s conversations on PETs are happening in many places but are not being driven by a representative coalition of ads industry leaders
PETs can be sliced into two categories:
For the former, the work Tech Lab can do is reactive. Tech Lab won’t define what platforms or browsers do. In this category, Tech Lab can help ease transitions and contribute to discussions at the W3C and other forums where these are discussed and developed. For the latter, Tech Lab has the option to be proactive. Many of the players in the PETs space in ad tech are already Tech Lab members. Learn more about PETs here.
Further the expertise required for enabling ad hoc deployment of PETs between groups of ads ecosystem participants can be further broken down into:
The former requires math and technology expertise: those confident in mathematical privacy techniques and inner workings of systems. Many of these techniques are readily available to be applied. The latter doesn’t require a new type of Working Group participant and leader. IAB Tech Lab’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) initiative will focus on the most impact potential: use case definition, API standards for PETs between pairs/groups of digital ads ecosystem participants, and stewarding open-source initiatives that could originate from this Working Group. Tech Lab might explore getting into the math side of PETs if specific needs are identified in the working group. PETs working group will bring together technology and digital advertising experts together to develop the standards and open source tools for evolving the application of PETs to digital advertising use cases. The initiative will primarily focus on:
The initiative involves comprehensive efforts to develop standards, guidance and evangelize PETs in digital advertising industry: