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Announcements
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August 11, 2021

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies and Building for the Future

By Graham Mudd

Vice President, Product Marketing, Ads

Today we're sharing more details about how we are approaching the next era of personalized experiences. With Apple and Google continuing to make changes via their browsers and operating systems, and with the changing privacy regulatory landscape, it’s important to acknowledge that digital advertising must evolve to become less reliant on individual third-party data. That’s why we’ve been investing in a multi-year effort to build a portfolio of privacy-enhancing technologies and collaborate with the industry on these and other standards that will support this next era.

As we mentioned in a post last month, we believe personalization in marketing is the best possible experience for people and businesses. Without personalized advertising, businesses would be harder to start and grow, new products and services would be harder to discover and would cost more, and people would see less relevant, less timely and less interesting ads. The free and open internet, including the news people read, the ways they communicate and the entertainment they watch, would become less accessible to those who can’t afford subscription services.

We are optimistic that new privacy-enhancing technologies will prove that personalization remains possible and effective as our industry evolves to become less reliant on individual third-party data. These technologies will help us minimize the amount of personal information we process, while still allowing us to show people relevant ads and measure ad effectiveness for advertisers.

Last year we began testing our Private Lift Measurement solution with select partners, which uses a privacy-enhancing technology called secure multi-party computation. This helps advertisers understand how their campaigns are performing, while adding extra layers of privacy to limit the information that can be learned by the advertiser or Facebook. This solution will be broadly available to advertisers next year. In the meantime, we have open sourced our framework for Private Computation Solutions, so that anyone in the industry can develop measurement products based on this technology. We’re also exploring applications for on-device learning, a technology that could improve a person’s ad experience by processing data locally on their device rather than sending individual data to a remote server or cloud.

These technologies will only be successful for people and businesses of all sizes if there is industry collaboration and a shared set of standards. That’s why we are calling on platforms, publishers, developers and other industry participants to work together — on these technologies and other privacy-focused standards and practices. We’re encouraged by the debates and solutions already in development through industry groups like the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).

Our engagement with the industry and platforms on these technologies has focused primarily on three areas:

  • Data use cases: What are advertisers’ most important uses of data that privacy-enhancing technology needs to address? We’ve been working with industry groups to develop lists of use cases for discussion (W3C and PRAM), and encourage more industry partners to share their perspective.
  • Proposals: What proposals can we develop that enable important uses of data while leveraging privacy-enhancing techniques?
  • Feedback: How can we collaborate to iterate on and improve existing proposals?

As we work with the industry to answer these questions, we know businesses — especially small businesses — are counting on us to help them navigate through these changes. Many of them don’t have large marketing budgets — or even marketing teams — so they use our tools to deliver and measure their ad campaigns efficiently. We remain committed to helping them grow, while also meeting our mutual customers’ privacy expectations.

Over the coming months, we’ll engage with clients, partners and the broader industry via educational events to discuss the next era of personalized experiences and the product proposals we hope to develop together. We will provide more details on these events and proposals soon.

New technologies take time to develop, but we’re confident that through our ongoing work and engagement with the broader industry, we can build solutions that will support a free and open internet.

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