Parakeet

The goal of Google's Privacy Sandbox is prevent marketers from engaging a particular audience in a particular context.

Microsoft's PARAKEET (Private and Anonymized Requests for Ads that Keep Efficacy and Enhance Transparency) is analogous to Criteo's Sparrow by relying on trusted server-side "gatekeeper" service rather than just Google.

Google acknowledged that Criteo's proposed Sparrow is an improvement on Google's Turtledove by acknowledging the need for server-side processing. Unlike Sparrow, where this trusted server hosts bidding models and executes auction logic, Parakeet uses the trusted server merely as a proxy system routing anonymized requests to the competitive ecosystem. This enables marketer buying systems to update their bids, budgets and tactics without the latency involved with sending asynchronous updates required by Turtledove, Sparrow and others.

Parakeet will add noise or aggregations to the information it proxies, meaningfully impairing its accuracy.

"The ad network [or DSP] will perform ad matching, ranking and auction with contextual and user interest information provided in privacy anonymized ad request."

Parakeet relies on fenced frames to receive the bid request it will proxy. The ad request routes through Parakeet, which applies its noise and may enrich audience information the trusted server has previously associated with this browser. While Parakeet allows the auction mechanics to be conducted by the competitive market, it does not describe how those organizations can train their machine learning models.

For the winning ad that renders on the publisher page, Parakeet also will proxy the user's click events through its service. This proxy redirect allows Parakeet to control what information the recipient marketer or publisher domain receives when users navigate the web. This proxy service also would allow the gatekeeper service to provide aggregate reporting. If marketers send their conversion data to the proxy service, this service could provide attribution reporting.

Given the immense amount of web activity proxied through these new servers, Parakeet expect that there will be an additional fee that publishers and marketers must bear. "The cost of running PARAKEET is an important aspect to discuss. Enabling a monetization service whose costs to run are shared by publishers and/or advertisers is not unique and is similar to existing mechanisms that use ad exchange fees and SSP and DSP fees. We believe this proposal can be funded in a similar manner."

Impact

By forcing publishers and marketers to route traffic through a new pay-to-access service, this disintermediates publishers from their customers and adds latency to existing system as well as people's navigation.

Given the potential conflict of interest, Criteo suggests with Sparrow that gatekeepers cannot compete with their any of their clients. Microsoft does not discuss this point.

Open Questions

• If different publishers route traffic through different gatekeepers, how many gatekeepers can one publisher query to retrieve aggregate reporting?
• What is the process for determining which organizations' servers are trusted?
• What is the time-delay in providing the data necessary for publishers to optimize their revenue?
• What is the time-delay in providing the data necessary for marketers to optimize their media spend?
• How many organizations can access the information collected by the proxy service to perform custom attribution and analytics?