Private-by-Design Advertising Meets the Real World

Abstract

There are a number of designs for an online advertising system that allow for behavioral targeting without revealing user online behavior or user interest profiles to the ad network. However, none of the proposed designs have been deployed in real-life settings. We present an effort to fill this gap by building and evaluating a fully functional prototype of a practical privacy-preserving ad system at a reasonably large scale. With more than 13K opted-in users, our system was in operation for over two months serving an average of 4800 active users daily. During the last month alone, we registered 790K ad views, 417 clicks, and even a small number of product purchases. In addition, our prototype is equipped with a differentially private data collection mechanism, which we used as the primary means for gathering experimental data. The data we collected show, for example, that our system obtained click-through rates comparable with those for Google display ads. In this paper, we describe our first-hand experience and lessons learned in running the first fully operational "private-by-design'' behavioral advertising and analytics system.