Our progress on developing and incorporating privacy-enhancing technologies

Last year, we shared our longer-term vision on privacy-enhancing technologies and how we believe they will become foundational to the future of personalized advertising experiences. Today, we want to share an update on the progress Meta and the industry have made towards these efforts and how advertisers can get involved.

Industry momentum on privacy-enhancing technologies

Industry collaboration on privacy-enhancing technologies is essential for the development of interoperable solutions and a shared set of standards to support a free and open internet. This year, we saw collaboration turn into tangible progress.

First, our proposal with Mozilla on a new privacy-preserving standard for ad measurement, Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), continues to advance within the World Wide Web Consortium’s Private Advertising Technology Community Group (W3C PATCG). The goal of this proposal is to create a new standard for measurement that is consistent and viable across all web browsers, so instead of each browser using a different type of ads measurement, we would have one standard across all browsers that gives advertisers the ability to do consistent and comparable measurement.

As part of this proposal, we’ve engaged Stanford’s Applied Cryptography Group to optimize the code design with added security for user privacy and published a more detailed protocol of the end-to-end solution to provide a closer look at what the end product will look like. We also developed a research prototype which provides us with benchmarks to estimate the cost of running the solution, so we can show businesses that this new privacy-first solution doesn’t mean extra costs. Proving the solution is feasible with real code is an important step in a long journey to set new standards. We are encouraged by the W3C PATCG’s progress towards a unified standard for attribution measurement.

Separately, we’ve helped form and have joined working groups at the IAB Tech Lab and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and we’ve engaged with academics from more than 100 universities to help the industry understand the challenges we all need to address.

For example, we collaborated with academics from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago to better understand the value of offsite data for ads personalization, in part to help guide the development of solutions that leverage privacy-enhancing technologies. The research reveals that advertisers’ costs increased by 37%¹ when removing offsite data from the ad delivery system with outsized impact on smaller advertisers in CPG, retail and ecommerce, who are often more reliant on digital performance advertising than larger, more established companies.

“We suspected that offsite data was critical to long-term advertising performance, but the academic literature surprisingly hadn’t quantified to what extent,” said Anna Tuchman, Associate Professor and Researcher at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “By quantifying the impact to businesses, we hope to broaden the industry’s understanding of the privacy and utility trade-offs of using offsite data for advertising.”

We encourage advertisers to actively participate in these industry conversations—including through IAB Tech Lab’s PET Working Group, Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WFA—and to share feedback with platforms, ensuring that businesses have a role in influencing these future technologies and standards. We also set up a Small Business Ads Ecosystem Hub and provided best practices to help advertisers maximize ad performance while still respecting people’s privacy.

Incorporating PETs into Meta’s portfolio of advertising solutions

Over the past year, we’ve also made progress developing our own portfolio of PET-based solutions, particularly our Private Lift Measurement product, which uses secure multi-party computation (MPC) to help advertisers understand how their campaigns are performing while limiting what the advertiser and Meta can learn about a person.