The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution – And A Smarter Solution

Meta and Mozilla suggested a new browser -based assignment system The attribution of privacy protection.

The aim is to monitor how advertising leads to conversion with less risk of privacy for users.

Unfortunately, although PPA seems to be solving an interesting mathematical problem if it is used for advertising in the real world, it will increase the risk of privacy for users.

Brands have better alternatives.

How PPA works

With PPA, browser and new aggregation service, they cooperate on the provision of aggregated information to the advertiser. First, JavaScript asks the “Agreement” to see the impression. The browser monitors impressions on many sites. Later, when the user buys something, the “conversion page” where the sale occurred could ask for an encrypted “conversion message” from the browser. The browser responds to a data block that the site cannot decode.

If you want to get usable information, the transfer site must save “gear messages” and pass it to the aggregation service. The aggregation service then returns information in a way that does not reveal whether someone who has bought something that has ever seen advertising or visited any particular site. Meta and Mozilla propose to use a computing system with multiple parties using two independent service providers to fulfill the role of aggregation services.

The advantage of privacy and vulnerability of PPA

Since no individual person can be monitored from an advertising impression to transform, PPA seems to have the advantage of privacy. However, it has vulnerability to the assignment fraud. The PPA specification states: “Fraud registration of impressions is a special problem of the API of the private attribute, because the impressions are stored only on the device. You cannot use intelligence on the server side to identify fraudulent impressions and exclude them from the assignment. ”

Fraud with assignment: permanent challenge

Assignment fraud is nothing new. Honey browser expansion recently achieved internet glory for what the Megalag YouTube channel claims Fraud – Detect when the user is going to order something and change the associated code of the influence on your own. However, the assignment will be monitored, some sneaky perpetrator will try to “steal” credit for conversions.

Getting conversion is really hard. First, someone has to create a website where people visit, pay attention and look at ads. Then someone has to sell an ad – which is either a personal process, a complex program settings or some of the two. And even if the site is doing everything right, the advertiser needs to create an advertisement that is sold.

By comparison, the fraud with the attribute is easy for those who have a certain view of the behavior of users to help them predict when to happen and get credit for helping it.

Assign fraud can be more than just a sneaky way to convert value from content creators to fraud hackers. PPA, where the browser works on fraud hiding, also causes fraud with the risk of privacy for users. This is because a rogue intermediary with supervision data that can predict sales can claim to assign PPA impressions on random sites that had nothing to do with selling.

And unlike simpler fraud, PPA disappears the evidence to the mathematical oblivion of the aggregation service. PPA is good for privacy in the same way as a seller who buys a copper wire without questions is good for the environment. Theoretically they recycle, but create incentives for people to destroy the infrastructure. Providing an undetectable payout for fraud creates more incentives to further monitor users.

PPA and Transparency Problems

Another risk of personal data protection is PPA transparency problems that work against some state laws with “RTK) (RTK) that allow users to obtain the information that companies have on them. Although the individual data is difficult to interpret, consumer organizations can conduct research that aggregates the data of many volunteers to seek damage to personal data such as algorithmic discrimination.

By making PPA more difficult or impossible for data to make or unable to make, motivate and cover the types of personal data protection problems that users are worried about to provide users of a mathematical victory. (Martin et al. Found that users do not consider tracking on the device as better for privacy than third -party monitoring.)

Some PPA supporters claim that PPA could be extended in the future to solve some of these problems. However, PPA will always be at the development rate of the disadvantage due to its mathematical direction and connect to the browser. Not only have opponents have a faster and simpler development task, but they are also able to see work on the PPA side in the form of browser code.

Although Meta suggests an open website for an open web, no one on the meta has been able to give up your own company report based on monitoring individual users. Even without the threat of privacy that it would introduce, PPA would disadvantage the open site.

Admap: Better alternative

The PPA feasible alternative is already available: AdMAP from the IAB Tech Lab Laboratory. While AdMap is simpler than PPA than PPA, it can provide real users much more real privacy protection. In Admap, although the main feature is encrypted, advertiser and publisher still have information needed to monitor fraud and responding to RTK users.

Although not every advertiser will use all the functions of the fraud available, the presence of these functions will help discourage fraud in admap. Admap’s architecture AdMap maintains, in addition to privacy, it keeps the loop against OODA fraud by not relying on time -consuming browser changes that can be analyzed and elaborated by fraud hackers. Although PPA is broken, a step back will teach us something: in the future, pay more attention to user research and legitimate parties, such as web publishers and legitimate advertisers.

“Data Divent“It is written by members of the media community and contains new ideas for the digital revolution in the media.

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