Privacy-preserving audience measurement in practice — Opportunities and challenges

The current practices of Web analytics and independent audience measurement are under legal and societal scrutiny, and the implemented and currently suggested approaches are either impractical, or most likely illegal under the upcoming General Data Protection Regulations of the European Union. While local solutions may achieve compliance for analytics, audience measurement inherently requires an independent third party for the verification of claimed audiences - a special challenge under the GDPR. We hence suggest to move the data processing from the measurement provider to the browser and to submit only unidentified aggregates, possibly over anonymization services, for mere counting. Our solution, though work in progress, hence achieves reliable verification but prevents identifiability, and thus ensures the users' privacy.