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News agency Reuters reports that Apple’s browser engine Webkit is all set to launch a technology to track advertising clicks, & whether they lead to a product purchase.
Users will not be uniquely identified across Sites they visit in order to track ad clicks. The technology will only let those Websites be involved in measuring the clicks, not any “opaque” third parties.
Here’s what the blog Webkit had to say:
We (Webkit) used the following principles as we designed this technology:
- Users should not be uniquely identified across websites for the purposes of ad click attribution. This means the combined data of an ad click and a conversion should not be attributable to a single user at web scale. To achieve this, our design has the following properties:
- Up to 64 ad campaigns can be measured in parallel per website where ads are placed by an advertiser. This low number means ad campaign IDs cannot be turned into user identifiers.
- Up to 64 conversion events can be distinguished on the advertiser’s own website. This means conversion IDs are also restricted from being turned into user identifiers.
- Only websites that users visit should be involved in measuring ad clicks and conversions. This means that opaque third-parties should not receive ad click attribution reports and we enforce it by requiring that the ad link is part of a first-party webpage and by only reporting on which first-party website a conversion happened.
- The browser should act on behalf of the user and do its best to preserve privacy while reporting on ad click attribution. We achieve this by:
- Sending attribution reports in a dedicated Private Browsing Mode even though the user is in regular browsing mode.
- Disallowing data like cookies for reporting purposes.
- Delaying reports randomly between 24 and 48 hours.
- Not supporting Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution at all when the user is in Private Browsing Mode.
- The browser vendor should not learn about the user’s ad clicks or conversions. For this reason, we designed the feature to do all of its work on-device. The browser vendor does not see any of the ad click attribution data.