Intent to Prototype: Private and Anonymized Requests for Ads that Keep Efficacy and Enhance Transparency ("PARAKEET")
Brandon Maslen
Contact emails
bra...@microsoft.com,
eri...@microsoft.com
Explainer
privacy-preserving-ads/Parakeet.md at main · WICG/privacy-preserving-ads · GitHub
Specification
None
Summary
PARAKEET is a set of APIs which leverage a service for anonymizing ad requests and user interest inference support. It provides significant privacy and control improvements for the user over today’s ad serving flows, including strong privacy contracts based on differential privacy and ad request anonymization as well as user transparency and control of ad interest membership and granularity. While providing those privacy improvements, it continues to enable monetization that leverages both site context and ad interest information in a unified request.
Blink component
Motivation
The motivation for this work is described in the explainer at https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Parakeet.md. In short, PARAKEET is designed to enable more privacy-preserving web advertising than exists today while simultaneously enabling the web ecosystem to continue functioning.
The TURTLEDOVE/FLEDGE effort is currently attempting to solve approximately the same use case with a different set of primitives. That effort requires the ad ecosystem to significantly redesign large portions of their current ad serving flow due to the on-device auction approach. PARAKEET’s approach instead leverages a request anonymization step using a browser-trusted service which enables non-individually identifying context from both the site the user is on and cross-site interests to be sent as part of ad requests. That in turn enables the ecosystem to retain more of their existing functionality while still preventing cross-site profile building of individuals. Where reasonable, PARAKEET aims to align API semantics with TURTLEDOVE/FLEDGE.
Initial public proposal
privacy-preserving-ads/Parakeet.md at main · WICG/privacy-preserving-ads · GitHub
TAG review
None
TAG review status
Not yet requested
Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility
The PARAKEET proposal has been influenced by a multitude of discussions with interested stakeholders. The Microsoft Edge team is the primary proponent of the proposal. The Google Chrome team has been focused on the FLEDGE proposal. Significant questions remain about the achievable privacy and monetization properties of the various proposals; having an implementation of PARAKEET will allow the ad ecosystem and other interested stakeholders to be better able to make direct comparisons between PARAKEET, FLEDGE, and other proposals. A shared goal is to align on a single set of APIs, but hands-on experience with the different approaches is critical to reach the right balance.
The proposal has evolved and will continue to evolve based on stakeholder feedback to better accommodate important uses cases in privacy preserving manners.
Current issues and updates are tracked at
Issues · WICG/privacy-preserving-ads · GitHub
Gecko: No signal
WebKit: No signal
Web developers: Limited signal about ultimate support. Various publisher and ad tech providers are engaging and planning to participate in experiments.
Debuggability
DevTools console logging will be added as appropriate for failures and soft-errors when calling newly exposed/modified Javascript APIs. Appropriate errors will be used to reject promises during
error conditions.
Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
No
Flag name
‘Parakeet’
Requires code in //chrome?
True – May require //chrome/browser code for implementation
Estimated milestones
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5615210531389440
This intent message was generated by
Chrome Platform Status.
Business motivation seems odd in an I2P. Instead of copying and pasting from the explainer, why not a single line referring to the explainer for motivation?
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