Mozilla, developers of the open-source Firefox web browser and Meta, formerly known as Facebook, have revealed that they are working together on an Interoperable Privacy Attribution solution (IPA).
The aim is to allow advertisers insight into campaign performance without breaching individual user privacy. They have jointly proposed to be the in-development solution to the Private Advertising Technology Community Group, part of the World Wide Web Consortium.
In broad terms, the solution seems simple. It would use multi-party computation to allow the analysis of user behavior without allowing websites, browsers or advertisers to learn about the behavior of individual users (a version of what is often called a “clean room”). Data would be aggregated to avoid traceability to single users.
“IPA is designed to provide a lot of flexibility for advertising businesses in terms of how they use the system. Cross-device and cross-browser attribution options in IPA enable new and more robust attribution capabilities, while maintaining privacy,” said a Mozilla blog, which also contains links to detailed technical specifications.
