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EFForg / privacybadger

Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically learns to block invisible trackers.
https://privacybadger.org
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Please differentiate between non-personalized/non-tracking AdSense and regular AdSense #2046

Open da2x opened 6 years ago

da2x commented 6 years ago

Is it possible to encurrage the use of non-personalized/non-tracking AdSense ad units by differentiating between ad requests for personalized/targeted ads and requests for non-personalized/non-tracking ads?

Both types are requested from pagead2.googlesyndication.com and right now Privacy Badger has decided to block all requests to this domain. However, websites can opt to request non-personalized/non-tracking ads from Google using AdSense’s new requestNonPersonalizedAds=1 API . Non-personalized requests use cookies to combat fraud and rate-limiting (not showing the exact same ads repeatedly). However, they don’t track you or show ads based on websites you’ve visited in the past. It’s a revival of Google AdSense’ original contextual advertisement premise where the ads are based on the contents of the current page only. More details here.

Non-personalized ad requests ha the additional URL parameter of &npa=1. Privacy Badger could look for this parameter in requests to AdSense domains like pagead2.googlesyndication.com and temporarily whitelist the domain to let the requests go through.

“Although these ads don’t use cookies for ad personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.” – Google

nightkr commented 6 years ago

Instead of keeping lists of what to block, Privacy Badger learns by watching which domains appear to be tracking you as you browse the Web.

da2x commented 6 years ago

The behavior of this one domain changes drastically with regards to tracking based on one URL parameter. I'm only suggesting this because this domain is one of the biggest advertisement networks out there and this one URL parameter aligns it with Privacy Badger's stated goal to only block resources that are tracking users and would encourage website publishers to switch to non-tracking ads.

“Although these ads don’t use cookies for ad personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse.” – Google

alanton commented 6 years ago

@da2x

This is worth investigating but it will take a while. There are two aspects to delve into:

(a) We need to find out more about Adsense's non-personalised ads, the cookies which support them, and any other data they are collecting. It one thing if we could be confident that there is not tracking based on external observation, another if it relies on Google making a promise based on internal organizational measures.

(b) For us to be able to differentiate between these two Adsense products, they would have to be served off different domains.

We'll check it out and come back with what we learn.