Season 2, Episode 6: Understanding Interoperable Private Attribution (with Ben Savage)

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Ben Savage, who works at the intersection of advertising and privacy at Meta. Ben is Meta's representative to the W3C in forums like the Private Advertising Technology Community Group and the Privacy Community Group.

At Meta, Ben has been heavily involved with a framework called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA, which is a distributed attribution and aggregation protocol that exists as a joint proposal between Meta and Mozilla. IPA has gained a great deal of attention as a potential solution for privacy-safe advertising attribution, and it is the subject of this episode. Ben and I go deep on several topics related to IPA and digital advertising privacy more broadly, including:

• A high-level conceptual overview of Interoperable Private Attribution;
• The origin of IPA as a joint proposal from Mozilla and Meta;
• The importance of the ease of adoption by advertisers and publishers for any privacy-enhancing technology;
• The degree of buy-in required from consumers to advance privacy-safe advertising solutions;
• And the process of establishing standards within W3C working groups

For more information about Interoperable Private Attribution and the broader subject of Multi-Party Computation, I suggest this YouTube series developed by Ben that is designed to explain these concepts to non-technical audiences.