Privacy-preserving digital ads infrastructure: An overview of Anonym’s technology
It’s been four months since Anonym joined Mozilla. Anonym was founded with the belief that new technologies can keep digital ads effective and measurable while respecting privacy. Mozilla has long been a leader in digital privacy, so Anonym is happy to report that we are right at home as a key pillar in Mozilla’s strategy to make digital advertising more private. As Laura discussed, while Mozilla’s product teams focus on privacy-respecting advertising tools that are relevant to products like Firefox and Fakespot, we are in parallel focused on building a viable alternative infrastructure for the industry.
Now that we’re settled in, we wanted to provide the advertising industry and the Mozilla community with an overview of the technologies we’re developing and share a few examples of how they can be used to improve user privacy.
First, it’s important for us to be clear about the specific problem we’re trying to address. Digital advertising is highly reliant on user level data sharing between various industry participants. A simple example: Ad platforms collect information about the browsing and buying behavior of individuals from millions of websites and apps. That information is often associated with a user’s “profile” and then is used to determine which ads to show that user. This practice is referred to by a number of terms – tracking, profiling, cross-site sharing, etc.
