SPARROW Proposal

[BasileLeparmentier]

Hi,

The TURTLEDOVE proposal introduces a mechanism to provide interest-based advertising whilst preserving user privacy. While we thank Google for this proposal, we think that several aspects can be enhanced to ensure broad adoption by advertisers and publishers and to safeguard most of the interest-based advertising value. Indeed, TURTLEDOVE in its current form:

• Does not cover legitimate advertising use cases outside of retargeting.
• Does not provide advertisers the ability to pilot their campaigns with low latency.
• Does not provide advertisers and publishers the ability to efficiently detect fraud.
• Does not provide advertisers the ability to ensure their ads are displayed in a context that fits their policy ("Brand safety"), or for publishers the ability to ensure ads displayed on their properties meet their standard ("Ad safety").
• Can be problematic, from an audit point of view, with locally computed bids. Without additional yet undisclosed audit capabilities for advertisers and publishers, only the browser has information about the bids and the clearing price.
• Can be improved in terms of the value it brings to advertisers, part of which translates into value for publishers, without any impact on user privacy.
• Can negatively impact user experience, as user device performance and data plan, especially in mobile environments, can will need to download in advance interest-based ad bundles (including pictures, sound, videos, etc.) and bidding scripts.

We would like to introduce an enhancement to TURTLEDOVE, named SPARROW, aiming at addressing these concerns whilst keeping all the privacy guarantees, user control and transparency improvements from TURTLEDOVE.

https://github.com/BasileLeparmentier/SPARROW

We thank all contributors to the W3C Web Advertising BG and hope that this proposal can help to pave the way for future of web advertising.

[brodrigu]

I believe this proposal is an overall improvement to TURTLEDOVE. Both TURTLEDOVE and SPARROW still suffer from an excess of complexity and have concerns that either solution will be able to reach viability in the market. However, the SPARROW proposal highlights the hidden gatekeeper role in TURTLEDOVE (google) and extracts it as an independent player. This change turns an otherwise unviable proposal into something that could be leveraged by the industry. As and added bonus, it unlocks additional capabilities that come with server-side, aggregate, views of ad requests. Furthermore, the proposals identification of this hidden gatekeeper role helps to clarify part of the trust issue the industry is having with TURTLEDOVE.