Intent to Prototype: First "Locally-Executed Decision over Groups" Experiment (FLEDGE)

[Paul Jensen]

Contact emails

kle...@google.com, paulj...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/master/FLEDGE.md

Specification

None

Summary

Provides a privacy advancing API to facilitate interest group based advertising.  FLEDGE shifts the interest data and the final ad decision browser-side instead of server-side, offering many advantages: strong privacy guarantees, as well as time limits on group membership, transparency into how the advertiser interest groups are built and used, and granular or global controls over this type of ad targeting.

Blink component

Blink

Motivation

Some online advertising has been based on showing an ad to a potentially-interested person who has previously interacted with the advertiser or ad network. Historically this has worked by the advertiser recognizing a specific person as they browse across web sites, a core privacy concern with today's web.

The TURTLEDOVE effort is about offering a new API to address this use case while offering some key privacy advances:

• The user’s browser, not the advertiser, holds the information about what the advertiser thinks a person is interested in.

• Advertisers can serve ads based on an interest, but cannot combine that interest with other information about the person — in particular, with who they are or what page they are visiting.

• Web sites the person visits, and the ad networks those sites use, cannot learn about their visitors' ad interests.

FLEDGE is Chrome's first experiment in this direction.

Initial public proposal

https://discourse.wicg.io/t/advertising-to-interest-groups-without-tracking/

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Not yet requested

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

The FLEDGE design draws on many discussions and proposals published during 2020, most notably:

• The original TURTLEDOVE from Chrome.

• SPARROW from Criteo, which entered WICG incubation jointly with TURTLEDOVE.

• Outcome-based TURTLEDOVE and Product-level TURTLEDOVE from RTB House.

• Dovekey from Google Ads.

• PARRROT from Magnite.

• TERN from NextRoll.

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5733583115255808

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.