User Account Level Opts Out

[shaoyu-ms]

Users can express their personalization choices including opting out individual retargeting ads at an account level with an ad network or publisher. These preferences roam across devices, browsers, and apps wherever the user uses that account to identify themselves. Since Turtledove is scoped to a single browser and the ad network does not know which user is represented when the remarketing request reaches the ad network, there is no way in Turtledove to honor these account-level choices including opting out retargeting ads.

[appascoe]

Presumably, an account-level preference would require a login on each browser/device/app. When a user logs in, the service can perform a backend lookup and choose to write an interest group such as no-retargeting into the browser. From there, the bidding.js function can handle the logic to not serve the user with those ads.

[michaelkleber]

If someone expresses personalization preferences to the browser, using some controls like the ones in https://github.com/WICG/turtledove#user-interface-controls, then we could have those preferences flow through Chrome Sync to other copies of Chrome they are logged into.

But other than that, you are correct: people who browse on multiple devices might have different personalization settings on each device. This seems similar to preferences stored in cookies today.

[shaoyu-ms]

@appascoe, currently account level opt-out can let users opt out individual ad when they see the ad. With the opaqueness of the retargeting ad, this will be hard to do at the individual ad level. "No Retargeting" is too coarse granularity as a choice for opting out.

@michaelkleber, Chrome sync is a potential solution for the account-level opt out. Yet it still cannot solve the issue completely as the same type of sync is also needed between different types of browsers (e.g. Chrome and Safari), between a browser and an app with the same account sign-in, in order to honor the account-level optouts.

Thanks.

[michaelkleber]

In a TURTLEDOVE world, a user could express a variety of preferences — leaving some specific interest group, or all IG's they were added to on some particular site they've visited, or all IG's owned by some particular domain, for example — as well as turning off this kind of targeting entirely.

Any browser could do UX research to find out what real people would want and how to present options; this isn't something that would be part of a spec. But browsers maintaining group memberships at least makes this kind of thing possible.

@shaoyu-ms Yes, I agree, something like Chrome Sync only solves a part of what you're asking for. With OS-level support, it could also be possible to unify this kind of preference across multiple browsers and apps on the same device.

[JensenPaul]

Closing this issue as it represents past design discussion that predates more recent proposals. I believe some of this feedback was incorporated into the Protected Audience (formerly known as FLEDGE) proposal and #573. If you feel further discussion is needed, please feel free to reopen this issue or file a new issue.