PROPOSED Private Advertising Technology Working Group Charter
The mission of the Private Advertising Technology Working Group, motivated by the W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles, is to specify web features and APIs that support advertising while acting in the interests of users, in particular providing strong privacy assurances using predominantly technical means. The Working Group welcomes participation from browser vendors, OS vendors, mobile application vendors, advertisers, publishers, ad buyers, advertising platforms and intermediaries, privacy advocates, web application developers, and other interested parties.
This proposed charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.
| Charter Status | See the group status page and detailed change history. |
|---|---|
| Start date | [dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved) |
| End date | [dd monthname yyyy] (Start date + 2 years) |
| Chairs |
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| Team Contacts |
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| Meeting Schedule |
Teleconferences: We expect to meet every 1-3 months for longer-than-hour blocks, which might be spread over several days
Face-to-face: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year. |
Motivation and Background
Origins
The Private Advertising Technology Working Group arose from efforts to implement privacy-forward technology and standards which support and evolve use cases that, until this point, have been dependent on third-party cookies and other tracking mechanisms. The initial approach to this topic was at the Improving Web Advertising Business Group which worked to define requirements and engage with the community to understand the needs of the advertising ecosystem. The work that started there has generated work taken up by a variety of other, more focused, groups.
The groups that formed to help generate new standards and processes around privacy technologies at the W3C included the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). This group has taken up community engagement to incubate web features and APIs that support advertising while acting in the interests of users, in particular providing strong privacy assurances using predominantly technical means. Some of the work incubated in that group has become mature enough to be taken up by a Working Group. The PATWG group was proposed to be chartered to take up work which reaches that state in PATCG. It also is prepared for work that matches our mission and scope and is ready to be taken up by a working group.
Motivation
This group is motivated by our mission and the need for a commercially sustainable web. We understand that such a web is accessed through user agents and those user agents should act in the interest of their users and provide strong assurances of privacy. Our concerns are focused on supporting and creating an environment where the many ad-driven stakeholders who build the web, and are interested in operating within the limitations of our scope, can find usable and useful processes by which to operate.
Scope
The Working Group will specify new web platform features. The purpose of these features is to support web advertising without compromising user privacy. Here "privacy" minimally refers to appropriate processing of personal information. Ways in which new features might enable inappropriate processing include (but are not limited to) enabling of cross-site or cross context recognition of users or enabling same-site or same-context recognition of users across the clearing of state.
The Working Group will produce specifications that are implemented by user agents. The implementation of specifications in user agents might interoperate with or depend on functionality provided by other entities. In these cases, the Working Group will coordinate with other organizations to provide specifications for necessary functions.
Out of Scope
Features that support advertising but provide privacy by means that are primarily non-technical should be proposed elsewhere.
Deliverables
Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.
Draft state indicates the state of the deliverable at the time of the charter approval. The Working Group intends to publish the latest state of their work as Candidate Recommendation (with Snapshots) and does not intend to advance their documents further in this charter period.
Normative Specifications
The Working Group will deliver the following W3C normative specifications:
- Private Attribution Measurement
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This specification defines how to privately measure advertisement attribution/conversion without revealing whether any individual user converts or does not.
Draft state: No draft
Expected completion: Q3 2025
The proposal will work with concepts and take inspiration from:
- Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA)
- Private Click Measurement
- Private Aggregation API
- Attribution Reporting API
- Prio-like Attribution Measurement
The proposal will arise from the dimensions set in the Design Dimensions document and will be guided by the threat model and principles documents initiated by PATCG.
The Working Group intends to add other normative specifications as the technology becomes ready. The expectation is that those specifications will be incubated in the PATCG and then, when they are ready for standardization, transition to PATWG. Potential areas include:
- Pre-campaign planning
- Intra-campaign decisioning and optimization, such as:
- Interest-based ad or content decisioning;
- User List Marketing/Remarketing;
- Fraud detection and prevention;
- Abuse detection and prevention;
- Frequency and recency controls;
- Error reporting and mitigation; and
- Device resource management.
- Post-campaign reporting and attribution
Other Deliverables
Other non-normative documents may be created such as:
- Use case and requirement documents;
- Test suite and implementation report for the specification;
- Primer or Best Practice documents to support web developers when designing applications.
Timeline
- Sept 2023: First face-to-face at TPAC
- October 2023: First teleconference meeting
- March 2024: Requirements and Use Cases Established for Private Measurement
- May 2024: First Draft for Private Measurement
Success Criteria
The WG will progress its normative specifications through the following standardization process: First Public Working Draft, Working Draft, Candidate Recommendation Snapshot, and Candidate Recommendation Draft. The WG does not intend to publish specifications as Proposed Recommendations.
There should be testing plans for each specification, starting from the earliest drafts.
To promote interoperability, all changes made to specifications in Candidate Recommendation or to features that have deployed implementations should have tests. Testing efforts should be conducted via the Web Platform Tests project.
Each specification should contain sections detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.
Each specification should contain a section on accessibility that describes the benefits and impacts, including ways specification features can be used to address them, and recommendations for maximizing accessibility in implementations.
This Working Group expects to follow the TAG Web Platform Design Principles.
All new features should have expressions of interest from at least two potential implementors before being incorporated in the specification.
In considering features, the group will state, during the development of those features or in the text of the document, privacy implications. Proposals should clearly state privacy issues, how they intend to address those issues, and the advertising use cases addressed in each deliverable.
Coordination
For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review. Additionally, the technologies this Working Group will be considering will be relevant for other standards development organizations such that the group is encouraged to coordinate with the appropriate groups at IETF, and others as needed.
The WG will coordinate with the Private Advertising Technology Community Group to solicit feedback from a wider community of interest. At any time, but always when a specification is undergoing a state change, the WG will ask the CG for feedback. The WG will allow the CG at least 4 weeks to gather that feedback.
Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:
W3C Groups
- Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG)
- This Working Group will work closely with PATCG. The expectation is that PATCG will incubate proposals which it then hands off to this Working Group for standardization. Most proposals in this Working Group should start in PATCG.
- Privacy Interest Group (PING)
- This Working Group will coordinate with PING on the development of principles that will guide the development of advertising capabilities.
- Web Application Security Working Group (WebAppSec)
- WebAppSec is both a potential venue for standardization of security-related capabilities and a source of expertise on web privacy.
- Privacy Community Group
- The Privacy Community Group is developing privacy-focused features. The PATWG is expected to regularly coordinate with the Privacy CG to ensure that the work of the two groups is not in conflict.
- Technical Architecture Group (TAG)
- The TAG develops general design principles that will guide the work of this Working Group. The TAG might provide input and guidance on specific aspects of the work.
- Improving Web Advertising Business Group (Web-Adv)
- The Improving Web Advertising Business Group includes representation from the potential consumers of these technologies, some of whom are not members
- Anti-Fraud Community Group
- The Anti-Fraud Community Group is working to identify and define fraud and abuse scenarios, then incubate countermeasures while maintaining security, privacy, and accessibility. Advertising use cases or proposals that are exposed to the potential for fraud might need to integrate with work from this group.
External Organizations
- IETF
- A number of IETF working groups are likely venues for standardization of protocol components that advertising features depend on and research groups are investigating issues that will feed into the designs this group will consider. The main group we will need to coordinate with is the Privacy Preserving Measurement group
Participation
To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants originating from more than 2 separate parties for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.
The Working Group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.
The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.
Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
Communication
Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, as participation is limited to Working Group members.
Information about this Working Group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the PATWG Working Group Home Page.
Most Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.
At the discretion of the Chairs and subject to a consensus call, the Working Group may designate a task force to study a particular subject and report back to the Working Group their findings and a recommendation. A task force will consist of a small group of volunteers who commit to investing significant amounts of time on the task over a short, time-bound, period.
Task forces operate under the same policies as the Working Group.
This Working Group primarily conducts its technical work in the PATWG GitHub repository, which is configured to send all issues and pull requests to the public mailing list: public-[email-list]@w3.org (archive). The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.
The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.
Decision Policy
This Working Group will seek to make decisions through consensus and the documented decision making process of the W3C Process Document (Section 5, Decisions). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the Working Group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.
After discussion in a GitHub issue and other informal discussion, substantive change proposals should be submitted as GitHub pull requests. These can come from the editors or from WG members. Editors are responsible for “curating” the pull requests to reject frivolous ones and substantive ones that the Chairs have determined do not comply with the IPR policies.
Chairs are responsible for determining whether or not there is WG consensus for the changes contained in a pull request. Unanimity is not required, but the Chairs should strive to make consensus decisions where there is significant support and few abstentions.
However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a Working Group vote and record a decision along with any formal objections.
To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days, depending on the Chair's evaluation of the consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.
All decisions made by the Working Group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.
This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.
Patent Policy
This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 September 2020). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.
Licensing
This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.
About this Charter
This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.
Charter History
The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 4.3, Advisory Committee Review of a Charter):
| Charter Period | Start Date | End Date | Changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial Charter | [dd monthname yyyy] | [dd monthname yyyy] | none |
Change log
Changes to this document are documented in this section.