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This is an in-depth technical explainer. If you're looking for a high-level introduction to Attribution Reporting with event-level reports, head over to Event-level reports in the Attribution Reporting API.

A list of all API guides and blog posts for this API is also available here.

Attribution Reporting with event-level reports

This document is an explainer for a potential new web platform feature which allows for measuring and reporting ad click and view conversions.

See the explainer on aggregate measurement for a potential extension on top of this.

Table of Contents

Motivation

Currently, the web ad industry measures conversions via identifiers they can associate across sites. These identifiers tie information about which ads were clicked to information about activity on the advertiser's site (the conversion). This allows advertisers to measure ROI, and for the entire ads ecosystem to understand how well ads perform.

Since the ads industry today uses common identifiers across advertiser and publisher sites to track conversions, these common identifiers can be used to enable other forms of cross-site tracking.

This doesn’t have to be the case, though, especially in cases where identifiers such as third-party cookies are either unavailable or undesirable. A new API surface can be added to the web platform to satisfy this use case without them, in a way that provides better privacy to users.

This API alone will not be able to support all conversion measurement use cases. We envision this API as one of potentially many new APIs that will seek to reproduce valid advertising use cases in the web platform in a privacy-preserving way. In particular, we think this API could be extended by using server-side aggregation to provide richer data, which we are continuing to explore.

Related work

There is an alternative Private Click Measurement draft spec in the PrivacyCG. See this WebKit blog post for more details.

There are multiple aggregate designs in wicg/privacy-preserving-ads, including Bucketization and MaskedLARK.

Folks from Meta and Mozilla have published the Interoperable Private Attribution(IPA) proposal for doing aggregate attribution measurement.

Brave has published and implemented an Ads Confirmation Protocol.

API Overview

Registering attribution sources

Attribution sources are events which future triggers can be attributed to.

Sources are registered by returning a new HTTP response header on requests which are eligible for attribution. A request is eligible as long as it has the Attribution-Reporting-Eligible request header.

There are two types of attribution sources, navigation sources and event sources.

navigation sources are registered via clicks on anchor tags:

<a href="https://advertiser.example/landing"
   attributionsrc="https://adtech.example/attribution_source?my_ad_id=123">
   click me
</a>

or via calls to window.open that occur with transient activation:

// Encode the attributionsrc URL in case it contains special characters, such as '=', that will
// cause the parameter to be improperly parsed
const encoded = encodeURIComponent('https://adtech.example/attribution_source?my_ad_id=123');
window.open(
  "https://advertiser.example/landing",
  "_blank",
  `attributionsrc=${encoded}`);

event sources do not require any user interaction and can be registered via <img> or <script> tags with the new attributionsrc attribute:

<img src="https://advertiser.example/pixel"
     attributionsrc="https://adtech.example/attribution_source?my_ad_id=123">

<script src="https://advertiser.example/register-view"
        attributionsrc="https://adtech.example/attribution_source?my_ad_id=123">

The attributionsrc attribute on <a>, <img>, and <script> may be empty or non-empty. If it is non-empty, it contains a space-separated list of URLs to which the browser will initiate a separate keepalive fetch request in the background. If it is empty, no background requests will be made. In both cases, the request(s) (originating from href, src, or attributionsrc) will contain an Attribution-Reporting-Eligible header that indicates the types of registrations that are allowed in the response.

For <a> and window.open, background requests, if any, are made when the user navigates. For <img> and <script>, background requests are made when the attributionsrc attribute is set on the DOM element.

In JavaScript, window.open also supports an empty or non-empty attributionsrc feature. The feature may appear multiple times with a value to indicate that multiple background requests should be made:

const url1 = encodeURIComponent('https://adtech1.example');
const url2 = encodeURIComponent('https://adtech2.example');
window.open(
  'https://advertiser.example/landing',
  '_blank',
  `attributionsrc=${url1} attributionsrc=${url2}`);

event sources can also be registered using existing JavaScript request APIs by setting the appropriate option:

const attributionReporting = {
  eventSourceEligible: true,
  triggerEligible: false,
};
// Optionally set keepalive to ensure the request outlives the page.
window.fetch("https://adtech.example/attribution_source?my_ad_id=123",
             { keepalive: true, attributionReporting });

The response to these requests will configure the API via a new JSON-encoded HTTP header called Attribution-Reporting-Register-Source of the form:

{
  "destination": "[site]",
  "source_event_id": "[64-bit unsigned integer]",
  "expiry": "[64-bit signed integer]",
  "priority": "[64-bit signed integer]",
  "event_report_window": "[64-bit signed integer]",
}

  • destination: Required. An origin whose site is where attribution will be triggered for this source. The field may also be specified as a list (JSON array) of no more than three elements.

  • source_event_id: Optional. A string encoding a 64-bit unsigned integer which represents the event-level data associated with this source. This will be limited to 64 bits of information but the value can vary. Defaults to 0.

  • expiry: Optional. A duration in seconds from registration after which the source can no longer be attributed. Defaults to 30 days, which is also the maximum. The minimum is 1 day. For event sources, this is rounded to the nearest day.

  • priority: Optional. A signed 64-bit integer used to prioritize this source with respect to other matching sources. When a trigger is registered, the browser finds the matching source with highest priority value and generates a report. The other sources will not generate reports. Defaults to 0.

  • event_report_window: Optional. A duration in seconds from registration during which reports may be created for this source. Also controls the last window in which reports will be sent. The minimum value is 3600 seconds (1 hour). The maximum value is expiry.

Once this header is received, the browser will proceed with handling an attribution source event. Note that it is possible to register multiple sources for the same request using HTTP redirects.

Note that we sometimes call the attributionsrc's origin the "reporting origin" since it is the origin that will end up receiving attribution reports.

Handling an attribution source event

A navigation attribution source stored only if the navigation occurs with transient user activation. event sources don’t require activation.

An attribution source is eligible for reporting if any page on any of the associated destination sites (advertiser sites) triggers attribution for the associated reporting origin.

Publisher-side Controls for Attribution Source Declaration

This API is governed by a Permissions Policy with a default allowlist of *. This means that publishers can opt out of the API for themselves or third parties, but by default anyone on the page can use the API. See issue 558 for more details.

Triggering Attribution

Attribution can only be triggered for a source on a page whose site matches the site of one of the sites provided in destination. To trigger attribution, a similar mechanism is used as source event registration, via HTML:

<img src="https://ad-tech.example/conversionpixel"
     attributionsrc="https://adtech.example/attribution_trigger?purchase=13">

or JavaScript:

const attributionReporting = {
  eventSourceEligible: false,
  triggerEligible: true,
};
// Optionally set keepalive to ensure the request outlives the page.
window.fetch("https://adtech.example/attribution_trigger?purchase=13",
             { keepalive: true, attributionReporting });

As a stop-gap to support pre-existing conversion tags which do not include the attributionsrc attribute, or use a different Fetch API, the browser will also process trigger registration headers for all subresource requests on the page where the attribution-reporting Permissions Policy is enabled.

Like source registrations, these requests should respond with a new HTTP header called Attribution-Reporting-Register-Trigger, which contains information about how to treat the trigger:

{
  "event_trigger_data": [{
    "trigger_data": "[unsigned 64-bit integer]",
    "priority": "[signed 64-bit integer]",
    "deduplication_key": "[unsigned 64-bit integer]"
  }]
}
  • trigger_data: Optional. Coarse-grained data to identify the trigger. The value will be used according to the attributed source's allowed trigger data and matching mode. Defaults to 0.
  • priority: Optional. A signed 64-bit integer representing the priority of this trigger compared to other triggers for the same source. Defaults to 0.
  • deduplication_key: Optional. An unsigned 64-bit integer that will be used to deduplicate multiple triggers that contain the same deduplication_key for a single source. Defaults to no deduplication.

When this header is received, the browser will schedule an attribution report as detailed in Trigger attribution algorithm. Note that the header can be present on redirect requests.

Triggering attribution requires the attribution-reporting Permissions Policy to be enabled in the context the request is made. See Publisher Controls for Attribution Source Declaration.

By default, navigation sources may be attributed up to 3 times. Event sources may be attributed up to 1 time.

Registration requests

Depending on the context in which it was made, a request is eligible to register sources, triggers, sources or triggers, or nothing, as indicated in the Attribution-Reporting-Eligible request header, which is a structured dictionary.

The reporting origin may use the value of this header to determine which registrations, if any, to include in its response. The browser will likewise ignore invalid registrations:

  1. <a> and window.open will have navigation-source.
  2. Other APIs that automatically set Attribution-Reporting-Eligible (like <img>) will contain event-source, trigger.
  3. Requests from JavaScript, e.g. window.fetch, can set this header using an option.
  4. All other requests will not have the Attribution-Reporting-Eligible header. For those requests the browser will permit trigger registration only.

Note: the Attribution-Reporting-Eligible header is subject to the browser adding "GREASE" parameters, to ensure that servers use a spec-compliant structured header parser. See here for an example. For this header, only the structured-dictionary keys should be interpreted: the values and parameters are currently unused, but may have meaning in the future.

Data limits and noise

The source_event_id is limited to 64 bits of information to enable uniquely identifying an ad click.

The trigger-side data must therefore be limited quite strictly, by limiting the amount of data and by applying noise to the data. By default, navigation sources will be limited to only 3 bits of trigger_data (the values 0 through 7), while event sources will be limited to only 1 bit (the values 0 through 1).

Sources can be configured to allow non-default trigger_data (values and/or cardinality):

{
  // Specifies how the 64-bit unsigned trigger_data from the trigger is matched
  // against the source's trigger_data, which is 32-bit. Defaults to "modulus".
  //
  // If "exact", the trigger_data must exactly match a value contained in the
  // source's trigger_data; if there is no such match, no event-level
  // attribution takes place.
  //
  // If "modulus", the source's trigger_data must form a contiguous sequence of
  // integers starting at 0. The trigger's trigger_data is taken modulus the
  // cardinality of this sequence and then matched against the trigger data.
  // See below for an example. It is an error to use "modulus" if the trigger
  // data does not form such a sequence.
  "trigger_data_matching": <one of "exact" or "modulus">,

  // Size must be in the range [0, 32], inclusive.
  // If omitted, defaults to [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] for navigation sources and
  // [0, 1] for event sources.
  "trigger_data": [<32-bit unsigned integer>, ...]
}

For example, the following configuration can be used to reduce noise for a navigation source (by limiting the number of distinct trigger data values) or increase noise for an event source (by increasing the number):

{
  ...,
  // The effective cardinality is 5, so the trigger's trigger_data will be taken
  // modulus 5. Likewise, noise will be applied using the effective cardinality
  // of 5, instead of the default for the source type.
  "trigger_data": [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
}

If "trigger_data_matching": "exact" is used, then the values themselves need not form a contiguous sequence beginning at zero, and any generated report will contain the exact value, e.g.

{
  "trigger_data_matching": "exact",
  // If this list does not contain the trigger's trigger_data value, attribution
  // will fail and no report will be generated. Noise will be applied using an
  // effective cardinality of 2.
  "trigger_data": [123, 456]
}

Noise will be applied to whether a source will be reported truthfully. When an attribution source is registered, the browser will perform one of the following steps given a probability p:

  • With probability 1 - p, the browser logs the source as normal
  • With probability p, the browser chooses randomly among all the possible output states of the API. This includes the choice of not reporting anything at all, or potentially reporting multiple fake reports for the event.

Note that this scheme is an instantiation of k-randomized response, see Differential privacy.

p is set such that each source is protected with randomized response that satisfies an epsilon value of 14. This would entail (for default configured sources):

  • p = .24% for navigation sources
  • p = .00025% for event sources

Note that correcting for this noise addition is straightforward in most cases, please see <TODO link to de-biasing advice/code snippet here>. Reports will be updated to include p so that noise correction can work correctly for configurations that have different values of p, or if different browsers apply different probabilities:

{
  "randomized_trigger_rate": 0.0024,
  ...
}

Note that these initial strawman parameters were chosen as a way to ease adoption of the API without negatively impacting utility substantially. They are subject to change in the future with additional feedback and do not necessarily reflect a final set of parameters.

Trigger attribution algorithm

When the browser receives an attribution trigger registration on a URL matching a destination site, it looks up all sources in storage that match <reporting origin, destination site> and picks the one with the greatest priority. If multiple sources have the greatest priority, the browser picks the one that was stored most recently.

The browser then schedules a report for the source that was picked by storing {reporting origin, destination site, source_event_id, decoded trigger_data, priority, deduplication_key} for the source. Scheduled reports will be sent as detailed in Sending scheduled reports.

The browser will create reports for a source only if the trigger's deduplication_key has not already been associated with a report for that source.

Each navigation source is allowed to schedule only a maximum of three reports, while each event source is only allowed to schedule a maximum of one.

If a source has already scheduled the maximum number of reports when a new report is being scheduled, the browser will compare the priority of the new report with the priorities of the scheduled reports for that source. If the new report has the lowest priority, it will be ignored. Otherwise, the browser will delete the scheduled report with the lowest priority and schedule the new report.

Multiple sources for the same trigger (Multi-touch)

If multiple sources were registered and associated with a single attribution trigger, the browser schedules reports for the one with the highest priority. If no priority is specified, the browser effectively performs last-touch.

There are many possible alternatives to this, like providing a choice of rules-based attribution models. However, it isn’t clear the benefits outweigh the additional complexity. Additionally, models other than last-click potentially leak more cross-site information if sources are clicked across different sites.

Sending Scheduled Reports

Reports for event sources will be sent after the source's event_report_window.

Reports for navigation sources may be reported earlier than the source's event_report_window, at specified points in time relative to when the source event was registered. See here for the precise algorithm.

Note that the report may be sent at a later date if the browser was not running when the window finished. In this case, reports will be sent on startup. The browser may also decide to delay some of these reports for a short random time on startup, so that they cannot be joined together easily by a given reporting origin.

Attribution Reports

To send a report, the browser will make a non-credentialed (i.e. without session cookies) secure HTTP POST request to:

https://<reporting origin>/.well-known/attribution-reporting/report-event-attribution

The report data is included in the request body as a JSON object with the following keys:

  • attribution_destination: the attribution destination set on the source

  • source_event_id: 64-bit event id set on the attribution source

  • trigger_data: Coarse data set in the attribution trigger registration

  • report_id: A UUID string for this report which can be used to prevent double counting

  • source_type: Either "navigation" or "event", indicates whether this source was associated with a navigation.

  • randomized_trigger_rate: Decimal number between 0 and 1 indicating how often noise is applied.

  • scheduled_report_time: The number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z, ignoring leap seconds) until the browser initially scheduled the report to be sent (to avoid noise around offline devices reporting late).

Data Encoding

The trigger data should be specified in a way that is amenable to the privacy assurances a browser wants to provide (i.e. the number of distinct data states supported).

The input values will be 64-bit integers which the browser will interpret modulo its maximum data value chosen by the browser. The browser will take the input and performs the equivalent of:

function getData(input, max_value) {
  return input % max_value;
}

The benefit of this method over using a fixed bit mask is that it allows browsers to implement max_values that aren’t multiples of 2. That is, browsers can choose a "fractional" bit limit if they want to.

Optional attribution filters

Source and trigger registration has additional optional functionality to both:

  1. Selectively filter some triggers (effectively ignoring them)
  2. Choose trigger data based on source event data

This can be done via simple extensions to the registration configuration.

We provide an interactive tool for experimenting with filters.

Source registration:

{
  "source_event_id": "12345678",
  "destination": "https://toasters.example",
  "expiry": "604800000",
  "filter_data": {
    "conversion_subdomain": ["electronics.megastore", "electronics2.megastore"],
    "product": ["1234"]
    // Note that "source_type" will be automatically generated as
    // one of {"navigation", "event"}

    // Note that "_lookback_window" cannot be used as it would be
    // ignored. The reserved key is used to support lookback window.
  }
}

Trigger registration:

{
  ... // existing fields, such as `event_trigger_data`

  // Note that "not_filters", which filters with a negation, is also supported.
  "filters": {
    "conversion_subdomain": ["electronics.megastore"],
    // Not set on the source side, so this key is ignored
    "directory": ["/store/electronics]"
  }
}

If keys in the filters dictionary match keys in the filter_data dictionary and the intersection of their values is empty, the trigger is ignored.

Example: Given a "conversion_subdomain" key present in both filter_data and filters dictionaries. If the values of the filters's "conversion_subdomain" key do not include "electronics.megastore" or "electronics2.megastore", the trigger gets ignored.

Note: A key which is present in one dictionary and not the other will not be included in the matching logic (i.e. the trigger will be considered).

Note: A filter dictionary does not support nested dictionaries or lists. It is only allowed to have a list of values with string type.

The event_trigger_data field can also be extended to do selective filtering to set trigger_data based on filter_data:

// Filter by the source type to handle different bit limits.
{
  "event_trigger_data": [
    {
      "trigger_data": "2",
      // Note that "not_filters", which filters with a negation, is also supported.
      "filters": {"source_type": ["navigation"]}
    },
    {
      "trigger_data": "1",
      "filters": {"source_type": ["event"]}
    }
  ]
}

filter_data must be a dictionary. filters can be a dictionary or a list of filter dictionaries. When a list is received, only one dictionary has to match for the trigger to be considered.

{
  "event_trigger_data": [
    {
      "trigger_data": "2",
      "filters": [
        {"product": ["1234"], "conversion_subdomain": ["electronics.megastore"]},  // OR
        {"product": ["4321"], "conversion_subdomain": ["electronics4.megastore"]}
      ]
    },
  ]
}

If the filters do not match for any of the event triggers, no event-level report will be created.

If the filters match for multiple event triggers, the first matching event trigger is used.

Reserved keys

Keys prefixed with _ are reserved: they cannot be used other than for specified features, e.g., lookback window.

Lookback window

Lookback window is supported with an optional reserved keyword _lookback_window which can be added to trigger's filters.

Unlike other filter keys whose values must be a list of strings, the _lookback_window value must be a positive integer that represents a positive duration in seconds.

When present on a filter (in filters), the duration since the source was registered must be less than or equal to the parsed lookback window duration for the filter to match, i.e., it must be inside the lookback window.

When present on a negated filter (in not_filters), the duration since the source was registered must be greater than the parsed lookback window duration for the filter to match, i.e., it must be outside the lookback window.

Optional: Varying frequency and number of reports

Sources have two additional optional top-level fields:

{
  ...

  // Restricts the total number of event-level reports that this source can generate.
  // After this maximum is hit, the source is no longer capable of producing any new data.
  // Must be greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 20.
  // Defaults to 3 for navigation sources and 1 for event sources.
  "max_event_level_reports": <int>,

  // Represents a series of time windows, starting at start_time.
  // Reports for this source will be delivered after the end of each window.
  // Time is encoded as seconds after source registration.
  // If omitted, will use the default windows.
  // It is an error to set both this field and the event_report_window field in
  // the same source.
  // Start time is inclusive, end times are exclusive.
  "event_report_windows": {

    // Optional. Defaults to 0.
    "start_time": <non-negative int>,

    // Required. Must be non-empty, strictly increasing, and greater than
    // start_time.
    "end_times": [<positive int>, ...]
  }
}

This may be used to:

  • Vary the frequency of reports by specifying the number of reporting windows
  • Vary the number of attributions per source registration
  • Reduce the amount of total noise by decreasing the above parameters
  • Configure reporting windows rather than using the defaults

Example

This example configuration supports optimizing for receiving reports at earlier reporting windows:

{
  ...
  "max_event_level_reports": 2,
  "event_report_windows": {
    "end_times": [7200, 43200, 86400] // 2 hours, 12 hours, 1 day in seconds
  }
}

Optional: transitional debugging reports

The Attribution Reporting API is a new and fairly complex way to do attribution measurement without third-party cookies. As such, we are open to introducing a transitional mechanism to learn more information about attribution reports while third-party cookies are available. This ensures that the API can be fully understood during roll-out and help flush out any bugs (either in browser or caller code), and more easily compare the performance to cookie-based alternatives.

Debugging will only be permitted if third-party cookies are available for the current site, and will be prohibited if third-party cookies are disabled generally or for a particular site.

Additionally, browsers may choose to enable debugging for specific use-cases (for example, reporting origins can enable debugging without the cookie check for Mode B groups during Chrome-facilitated testing).

Attribution-success debugging reports

Source and trigger registrations will both accept a new field debug_key:

{
  ...
  "debug_key": "[64-bit unsigned integer]"
}

If a report is created with both source and trigger debug keys, a duplicate debug report will be sent immediately to a .well-known/attribution-reporting/debug/report-event-attribution endpoint. The debug reports will be identical to normal reports, including the two debug key fields. Including these keys in both allows tying normal reports to the separate stream of debug reports.

{
  // normal report fields...
  "source_debug_key": "[64-bit unsigned integer]",
  "trigger_debug_key": "[64-bit unsigned integer]"
}

Verbose debugging reports

We also introduce a debugging framework to allow developers to monitor certain failures in the attribution registrations.

The browser will send non-credentialed secure HTTP POST requests to the reporting endpoints, see below. The report data is included in the request body as a JSON list of objects, e.g.:

[{
  "type": "<report type>", // e.g. "source-destination-limit"
  "body": {
    "attribution_destination": "https://destination.example",
    "limit": "100", // the browser's limit
    "source_event_id": "<source event id in the source registration>",
    "source_site": "https://source.example"
  }
}]

Each object has:

  • type: a string that indicates the category of report.
  • body: the contents of the report as defined by the type.

These debugging reports will be sent immediately upon the error occurring during attribution registrations outside a fenced frame tree.

Reporting endpoints

The reporting origins may opt in to receiving debugging reports by adding a new debug_reporting dictionary field to the Attribution-Reporting-Register-Source and Attribution-Reporting-Register-Trigger headers:

{
  ... // existing fields

  "debug_reporting": true // defaults to false if not present
}

The debugging reports will be sent to a new endpoint:

https://<reporting origin>/.well-known/attribution-reporting/debug/verbose

In order to receive verbose debug reports on trigger registrations, the reporting origin needs to be able to access third-party cookies on the destination site. If the trigger is attributed to a source, the reporting origin also needed to be able to access third-party cookies on the source site at the time of source registration.

TODO: Consider adding support for the top-level site to opt in to receiving debug reports without cross-site leak.

TODO: Consider supporting debug reports for attribution registrations inside a fenced frame tree.

Optional: header-error debugging reports

The headers related to the Attribution Reporting API can be validated by the header validator. In order to better facilitate API debugging, we also allow developers to monitor validation errors originating from the browser.

The reporting origins may opt in to receiving debugging reports by responding with a dictionary structured header Attribution-Reporting-Info. The key is report-header-errors and the value is a structured header boolean.

Attribution-Reporting-Info: report-header-errors

The debugging reports will be sent immediately to the reporting endpoint:

https://<reporting origin>/.well-known/attribution-reporting/debug/verbose

The report data is included in the request body as a JSON list of objects, e.g.

[{
  "type": "header-parsing-error",
  "body": {
    "context_site": "https://source.example",
    "header": "Attribution-Reporting-Register-Source",
    "value": "!!!", // header value received in the response
    "error": "invalid JSON" // optional error details that may vary across browsers or different versions of the same browser
  }
}]

Note: The report body is a JSON list to align with the other verbose debugging reports.

Sample Usage

publisher.example wants to show ads on their site, so they contract out to ad-tech.example. ad-tech.example's script in the main document creates a cross-origin iframe to host the third party advertisement for toasters.example.

Within the iframe, ad-tech-3p.example code annotates their anchor tags to use the ad-tech.example reporting origin, and sets the attributionsrc attribute based on the ad that was served (e.g. some ad with id 123456).

<iframe src="https://ad-tech-3p.example/show-some-ad"
        allow="attribution-reporting">
...
<a
  href="https://toasters.example/purchase"
  attributionsrc="https://ad-tech.example?adid=123456">
  click me!
</a>
...
</iframe>

A user clicks on the ad and this opens a window that lands on a URL to toasters.example/purchase. In the background, the browser issues an HTTP request to https://ad-tech.example?adid=123456. The ad-tech responds with a Attribution-Reporting-Register-Source JSON header:

{
  "source_event_id": "12345678",
  "destination": "https://toasters.example",
  "expiry": "604800000"
}

2 days later, the user buys something on toasters.example. toasters.example triggers attribution on the few different ad-tech companies it buys ads on, including ad-tech.example, by adding conversion pixels:

<img src="..." attributionsrc="https://ad-tech.example/trigger-attribution?model=toastmaster3000&price=$49.99&...">

ad-tech.example receives this request, and decides to trigger attribution on toasters.example. They must compress all of the data into 3 bits, so ad-tech.example chooses to encode the value as "2" (e.g. some bucketed version of the purchase value). They respond to the request with an Attribution-Reporting-Register-Trigger header:

{
  "event_trigger_data": [{
    "trigger_data": "2"
  }]
}

The browser sees this response, and schedules a report to be sent. The report is associated with the 7-day deadline as the 2-day deadline has passed. Roughly 5 days later, ad-tech.example receives the following HTTP POST to https://ad-tech.example/.well-known/attribution-reporting/report-event-attribution with the following body:

{
  "attribution_destination": "https://toasters.example",
  "source_event_id": "12345678",
  "trigger_data": "2"
}

Noisy fake conversion example

Assume the caller uses the same inputs as in the above example, however, the noise mechanism in the browser chooses to generate completely fake data for the source event. This occurs with some probability p.

To generate fake events, the browser considers all possible outputs for a given source event:

  • No reports at all
  • One report with metadata "0" at the first reporting window
  • One report with metadata "1" at the first reporting window and one report with metadata "3" at the second reporting window
  • etc. etc. etc.

After enumerating all possible outputs of the API for a given source event, the browser simply selects one of them at random uniformly. Any subsequent true trigger events that would be attributed to the source event are completely ignored.

In the above example, the browser could have chosen to generate three reports:

  • One report with metadata "7", sent 2 days after the click
  • One report with metadata "3", sent 7 days after the click
  • One report with metadata "0", also sent 7 days after the click

Storage limits

The browser may apply storage limits in order to prevent excessive resource usage. The API currently has storage limits on the pending sources per origin and pending event-level reports per destination site.

Privacy Considerations

A primary privacy goal of the API is to make linking identity between two different top-level sites difficult. This happens when either a request or a JavaScript environment has two user IDs from two different sites simultaneously.

Secondary goals of the API are to:

  • give some level of plausible deniability to cross-site data leakage associated with source events.
  • limit the raw amount of cross-site information a site can learn relative to a source event

In this API, the 64-bit source ID can encode a user ID from the publisher’s top- level site, but the low-entropy, noisy trigger data could only encode a small part of a user ID from the advertiser’s top-level site. The source ID and the trigger data are never exposed to a JavaScript environment together, and the request that includes both of them is sent without credentials and at a different time from either event, so the request adds little new information linkable to these events. This allows us to limit the information gained by the ad-tech relative to a source event.

Additionally, there is a small chance that all the output for a given source event is completely fabricated by the browser, giving the user plausible deniability whether subsequent trigger events actually occurred the way they were reported.

In order to achieve the privacy goals listed above the API has various rate limits, which can be found here for Chromium.

Trigger Data

Trigger data, e.g. advertiser-side data, is extremely important for critical use cases like reporting the purchase value of a conversion. However, too much advertiser-side data could be used to link advertiser identity with publisher identity.

Mitigations against this are to provide only coarse information (only a few bits at a time), and introduce some noise to the API output. Even sophisticated attackers will therefore need to invoke the API multiple times (through multiple clicks/views) to join identity between sites with high confidence.

Note that this noise still allows for aggregate measurement of bucket sizes with an unbiased estimator (assuming rate-limits are not hit) See generic approaches of dealing with Randomized response for a starting point.

TODO: Update this script to account for the more complicated randomized response approach.

Reporting Delay

By bucketing reports within a small number reporting deadlines, it becomes harder to associate a report with the identity of the user on the advertiser’s site via timing side channels.

Reports within the same reporting window occur within an anonymity set with all others during that time period. For example, if we didn’t bucket reports with a delay (and instead sent them immediately after a trigger event), the reports (which contain publisher IDs) could be easily joined up with the advertiser’s first-party information via correlating timestamps.

Note that the delay windows / deadlines chosen represent a trade-off with utility, since it becomes harder to properly assign credit to a click if the time from click to conversion is not known. That is, time-to-conversion is an important signal for proper attribution. Browsers should make sure that this trade-off is concretely evaluated for both privacy and utility before deciding on a delay.

Reporting origin limits

If the advertiser is allowed to cycle through many possible reporting origins, then the publisher and advertiser don’t necessarily have to agree a priori on what origin to use, and which origin actually ends up getting used reveals some extra information.

To prevent this kind of abuse, the browser should limit the number of reporting origins per <source site, destination site> pair, counted per source registration.

Additionally, there should be a limit on the number of reporting origins per <source site, destination site, 30 days>, counted for every attribution that is generated, and a limit on the number of reporting origins per <source site, reporting site, 1 day> counted per source registration.

Clearing Site Data

Attribution source data and attribution reports in browser storage should be clearable using existing "clear browsing data" functionality offered by browsers.

Reporting cooldown / rate limits

To limit the amount of user identity leakage between a <source site, destination site> pair, the browser should throttle the amount of total information sent through this API in a given time period for a user. The browser should set a maximum number of attributions per <source site, destination site, reporting site, user> tuple per time period. The browser will reject additional attributions when this limit is met during any such time period. This attribution limit is separate for event-level and aggregate reporting.

The longer the cooldown windows are, the harder it is to abuse the API and join identity. Ideally attribution thresholds should be low enough to avoid leaking too much information, with cooldown windows as long as practically possible.

Note that splitting these limits by the reporting site introduces a possible leak when multiple sites collude with each other. However, the alternative makes it very difficult to adopt the API if all reporting sites had to share a budget.

Less trigger-side data

Registering event attribution sources is not gated on a user interaction or top- level navigation, allowing them to be registered more frequently and with greater ease. For example, by restricting to 1 bit of data and 1 report per event source, a reportingorigin would need to register many more sources in order to link cross-site identity relative to the Click Through API.

This is further restricted by rate-limiting the usage of the API between two sites, using reporting cooldowns. Due to the different characteristics between classes of sources, these cooldowns should have independent limits on the number of reports of each type.

The number of reporting windows is another vector which can contain trigger-side information. By restricting to a single window, a reportingorigin does not receive any additional information on when in the attribution window a source was triggered.

Browsing history reconstruction

Reporting attribution allows the reportingorigin to learn whether a given user on the source site visited (one of) the destination site(s) at all.

This threat is be mitigated in a number of ways:

Adding noise to whether a trigger is genuine

By adding noise to whether an attribute source gets triggered, a reporting origin will not know with absolute certainty whether a particular ad view led to a site visit. See Differential privacy.

Limiting the number of unique destinations covered by unexpired sources

To limit the breadth of destination sites that a reporting origin may be trying to measure user visits on, the browser can limit the number destination sites represented by unexpired sources for a source-site.

The browser can place a limit on the number of a source site's unexpired source's unique destination sites. Source registrations will accept an optional field destination_limit_priority to allow developers to prioritize the destinations registered with this source with respect to other destinations for the purpose of source deactivation.

{
  ..., // existing fields
  "destination_limit_priority": "[64-bit signed integer]" // defaults to 0 if not present
}

When an attribution source is registered for a site that is not already in the unexpired sources and a source site is at its limit, the browser will sort the destination sites registered by unexpired sources, including the new source, by destination_limit_priority in descending order and by the registration time in descending order. The browser will then select the first few destination sites within this limit, and delete pending sources and aggregatable reports associated with the unselected destination sites. Any event-level reports are not deleted, as the leak of user's browsing history is mitigated by fake reports within differential privacy.

The lower this value, the harder it is for a reporting origin to use the API to try and measure user browsing activity not associated with ads being shown. Browsers may choose parameters on the number of destinations to make their own tradeoffs for privacy and utility.

Because this limit is per source site, it is possible for different reporting origin on a site to push the other attribution sources out of the browser. See the denial of service for more details. To prevent this attack, the browser should maintain these limits per reporting site. This effectively limits the number of unique sites covered per {source site, reporting site} applied to all unexpired sources regardless of type at source time.

The browser can also limit the number of destination sites per {source site, reporting site, 1 day} to mitigate the history reconstruction attack.

Limiting the number of unique destinations per source site

To further reduce the possibility of a history reconstruction attack, the browser can also limit the number of destination sites registered per {source-site, 1 minute}.

Additionally, to prevent one origin from using up the budget in the limit above, the browser can also limit the number of destination sites per {source site, reporting site, 1 minute}.

Differential privacy

A goal of this work is to create a framework that would support making event-level measurement that satisfies local differential privacy. This follows from our use of k-randomized response to generate noisy output for each source event. For a given output space O with cardinality k, true value v in the output space, and flip probability p, the k-randomized response algorithm:

  • Flips a biased coin with heads probability p
  • If heads, return a random value in O
  • Otherwise return v

k-randomized response is an algorithm that is epsilon differentially private if p = k / (k + exp(epsilon) - 1). For low enough values of epsilon, a given source’s true output should be well protected by the randomized response mechanism.

Note that the number of all possible output states k in the above design is:

  • 2925 for click sources. This results from a particular "stars and bars" counting method which derives k = (num_reporting_windows * num_trigger_data + num_reports choose num_reports) = (3 * 8 + 3 choose 3). There are three reports per click (represented by stars) which can land in 3 * 8 + 1 bins. One bin corresponds to the no-report case, while the 24 others are the choice of one of 3 intermediate window and one of 8 metadata. To find the total number of ways to put 3 stars in of the bins, the "stars and bars" method represents the 3 * 8 + 1 bins by 3 * 8 bars and the 3 reports by stars, which makes a total 3 + 3 * 8 symbols. The total number of combinations is found by choosing the location of three stars out of 3 + 3 * 8 symbols, hence the formula.
  • 3 for event-sources (no attribution, attribution with trigger data 1, attribution with trigger data 0). This also follows from (1 * 2 + 1 choose 1).

Note that the scope of privacy in the current design is not user-level, but rather source-level. This follows from the fact that noise is added independently per source-event, and source events are not strictly rate-limited. Exact noise parameters are subject to change with feedback. The primary goal with this proposal as written is to ensure that the browser has the appropriate infrastructure foundation to develop locally differentially private methods in the future. Tightening the privacy scope will also be considered in future work.

Our plan is to adjust the level of noise added based on feedback during the origin trial period, and our goal with this initial version is to create a foundation for further exploration into formally private methods for measurement.

Speculative: Limits based on first party storage

Another mitigation on joining identity across publisher and advertiser sites is to limit the number of reports for any given <publisher, advertiser> pair until the advertiser clears their site data. This could occur via the Clear-Site-Data header or by explicit user action.

To prevent linking across deletions, we might need to introduce new options to the Clear-Site-Data header to only clear data after the page has unloaded.

Security considerations

Reporting origin control

Reports can only be generated if the same origin responds with headers that register source events and trigger events. There is no way for an origin to register events on behalf of another origin, which is an important restriction to prevent fraudulent reports.

Denial of service

Rate limits and other restrictions to the API can cause reports to no longer be sent in some cases. It is important to consider all the cases where an origin could utilize the API in some way to lock out other origins, and minimize that risk if possible.

Currently, the only known limits in this proposal that could risk denial of service are the reporting origin limits and the number of unique destinations per source site limits. These are an explicit trade-off for privacy that should be monitored for abuse.

Top site permission model

The Permissions Policy is used to globally enable or disable the API. Additionally, network requests need fine grained permission in the form of requiring an attributionsrc attribute.