Drawn from cryptography and statistics, these technologies like multi-party computation and differential privacy come after Google announced its own alternative to third-party cookies. Facebook is redrawing the borders of its digital advertising landscape to ensure personalization of ads do not infringe upon the privacy of its users, according to a blog post by Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads Graham Mudd on August 11. The post said that the company is developing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) which reduce Facebook's reliance on individual third-party data to deliver personalised ads. The notion of privacy has taken centre stage in conversations around Big Tech and its influence on the lives of people at large. Big tech companies like Facebook have been facing pushback for years on some of their practices to gather user data and using it to track them across the digital spectrum. Apple rolled out a prompt late last year to iPhones where users can decide which apps can track them across other apps to deliver targetted ads. Google is also rolling out something similar for Android phones by phasing out third-party cookies and replacing them with a mechanism called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) that groups clusters of people with similar interests instead of tracking them individually. On the legislative end, the European Union is exploring a ban on targetted ads as part of a proposal called the Digital Services Act, and the Biden administration is pursuing its interest in policing the “surveillance of users” by “dominant Internet platforms.” Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) touted by…
