Intent to Ship: Protected Audiences Negative Targeting

[Orr Bernstein]

Contact emails

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

Explainer

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/780

Specification

https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/796

Summary

In online ad auctions for ad space, it’s sometimes useful to prevent showing an ad to certain audiences, a concept known as negative targeting. For example, you might not want to show a new customer advertisement to existing customers. New customer acquisition campaigns most often have this as a critical requirement. Protected Audience currently enables ads to target users that have been joined to a given interest group through some past activity on the web. This feature extends Protected Audience to enable negative targeting by allowing new ads to target only those users who have not been joined to a given interest group. In this way, we're enabling advertisers to target new groups of users using the existing privacy-preserving concepts of the Protected Audience API.

Blink component

Blink>InterestGroups

TAG review

The parent proposal, Protected Audience, is still pending: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/723

TAG review status

Pending

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

None. This is an optional new feature of the Protected Audience API. Ad techs can use this new feature by specifying values for new fields in the auction config. Without explicit values for those new fields, there's no functional behavioral change as a result of this feature.

Gecko & WebKit: No signal on parent proposal, Protected Audience.  Asked in the Mozilla forum here, and in the Webkit forum here.

Web developers: Adtech asked for this via Protected Audience Github issue #319.

Debuggability

Additional bids sent into the auction are visible in their response headers via DevTools. You can determine if the additional bid was sent for scoring by adding a breakpoint in the scoring script in DevTools. Error scenarios, e.g. signature verification errors and joining origin mismatch on negative interest groups - are written to the console. We're considering additional DevTools enhancements to aid additional bids debugging.

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView)?

It will be supported on all platforms that support Protected Audience, so all but WebView.

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

We plan to add WPTs to cover this API in the next month.

Flag name on chrome://flags

None

Finch feature name

FledgeNegativeTargeting

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop and Android in M118.

Anticipated spec changes

None related to this feature.

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5021508157571072

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Chris Harrelson]

Please fill out the other chromestatus review categories (privacy, security, etc); we'll re-review once those are done.

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[Mike Taylor]

LGTM1 % landing https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/796. Please follow up with the WPTs as well.

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[Yoav Weiss]

LGTM2 with the same conditions

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[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM3, same.

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[Orr Bernstein]

Thank you all so much. I'll update this thread when https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/796 has landed.

All the best,

- Orr

[Orr Bernstein]

FYI, the spec (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/796) has been merged. Thank you all again.

All the best,

- Orr

[Orr Bernstein]

Hi all,

We have a small delta to this feature we'd like to implement. In our current design, ad techs need to provide a flag, `adAuctionHeaders` on their `fetch()` request. (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md#63-http-response-headers) However, we received feedback that some ad techs use iframe navigation instead of a `fetch()`.   (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/issues/319#issuecomment-1766815150) To enable those ad techs to use this feature, we'd like to minimally extend our design to allow those that use iframe navigation to specify an `adAuctionHeaders` attribute on the iframe element that behaves the same as the `adAuctionHeaders` flag on `fetch()` requests.

For more details, please see the PRs we've prepared for the spec - https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/883 - and the explainer - https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/887.

Could you please review and provide LGTMs to ship this delta? Thank you so much!

All the best,

- Orr

[Chris Harrelson]

Hi Orr,

Have you already shipped the negative targeting work? Or are you proposing to batch these additional changes together with that, and consider these new changes thematically related? If not, I think it would be more clear to make a new I2S and chromestatus entry.

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[Orr Bernstein]

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for the quick response. We have not yet shipped the negative targeting work. The absence of these additional changes means that some of the potential adopters of negative targeting can't do so, and so I was indeed proposing to batch these additional changes together with negative targeting. Would you recommend a new I2S and chromestatus entry? Thanks again.

All the best,

- Orr

[Chris Harrelson]

If you want to batch it together that sounds fine to me. Can you:

* Update the chromestatus entry accordingly (including shipping milestones, updated description, and potentially re-review of privacy security etc)

* Land those two PRs for the spec and explainer

Then the API owners can review again and re-issue 3 new LGTMs if it looks good.

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[Orr Bernstein]

Hi all,

Thank you for your guidance here. I've updated the chromestatus entry to reflect the aforementioned delta, noting that the HTTP response header processing involved in this feature will work for both Fetch and iframe navigations. Both the explainer (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/887) and spec (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/pull/918) changes to reflect that delta have been merged. When you have a chance, could you please take a look? Thank you again!

All the best,

- Orr

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM1

[Mike Taylor]

No concerns. LGTM2

[Rick Byers]

LGTM3

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[Orr Bernstein]

Thank you, everyone! I really appreciate it.