Privacy in Web Advertising: Opportunities, Challenges, and a Call to Action
Speaker
Roxana Geambasu
Columbia University
Host
Ryan Lehmkuhl
Web advertising is at a pivotal moment, with a real opportunity to improve online privacy. However, technical challenges are stalling progress, particularly the difficulty of building high-utility, privacy-preserving advertising APIs. This challenge remains a significant roadblock to getting major entities to commit to disabling current web tracking methods without viable alternatives. Despite these setbacks, there is strong interest from most major browsers in replacing invasive third-party tracking with privacy-conscious APIs that meet both advertisers' needs and user privacy expectations.
This is where the privacy research community must step in. We need to tackle real-world challenges and provide solutions that work for both advertisers and users. In this talk, I’ll present our group’s work—developed in collaboration with Meta and Mozilla and as part of our engagement with an industry-led W3C community group—on a privacy architecture that balances robust user privacy with advertiser utility. This architecture has been integrated into Mozilla’s latest privacy-preserving API proposal, which recently passed a W3C consensus call to move toward standardization. Our upcoming SOSP 2024 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16719) describes, analyzes, and evaluates this architecture.
However, many challenges remain. My message to the privacy and security community is clear: now is the time to engage. If we don’t act, these promising changes may not lead to meaningful privacy improvements, and the responsibility will lie with us as much as with the industry.
This is where the privacy research community must step in. We need to tackle real-world challenges and provide solutions that work for both advertisers and users. In this talk, I’ll present our group’s work—developed in collaboration with Meta and Mozilla and as part of our engagement with an industry-led W3C community group—on a privacy architecture that balances robust user privacy with advertiser utility. This architecture has been integrated into Mozilla’s latest privacy-preserving API proposal, which recently passed a W3C consensus call to move toward standardization. Our upcoming SOSP 2024 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16719) describes, analyzes, and evaluates this architecture.
However, many challenges remain. My message to the privacy and security community is clear: now is the time to engage. If we don’t act, these promising changes may not lead to meaningful privacy improvements, and the responsibility will lie with us as much as with the industry.