It’s a false narrative that personalization and privacy can’t coexist.
Businesses will always need to find a compromise between privacy and utility, but it’s more than possible to strike a healthy balance, says Graham Mudd, president and chief product officer at privacy startup Anonym, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The challenge is figuring out the most reasonable approach, which is why it’s important to get feedback from lawyers, policymakers and technologists, says Mudd, who co-founded Anonym in early 2022 after more than a decade in executive roles at Meta focusing on measurement, monetization and product marketing for ads.
Mudd’s co-founder is someone many in the ad industry will recognize: Brad Smallwood, who was VP of marketing science at Facebook for more than 12 years.
Anonym’s approach combines privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) with confidential computing in a trusted execution environment – which is a technical way of saying the company uses encrypted data to help advertisers find new customers, connect impressions to conversions and optimize campaigns.
“We don’t create profiles or hold on to that data,” Mudd says. “It flows into our system, we do the compute on it and then we discard it.”
But that’s not the traditional way that ad tech functions. Ad tech relies on data collection.
And one of the main reasons why regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, have started paying much closer attention to the online advertising industry – which you can see from its recent settlements, enforcement actions and lawsuits – is because it believes data collection is out of control.
“Ad platforms know a lot about what you do on the internet, purely because they want to gather that data for advertising purposes,” Mudd says. “[But in many ways] it doesn’t feel like an even or fair trade-off.”
Also in this episode: How to pronounce “Anonym” (it’s like “anonymous,” but without the “ous”), an insider’s look at how Meta revamped its ads platform after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (and then did it again to manage fallout from Apple’s ATT), the pros and cons of proprietary vs. open source PETs, where ad tech went wrong and Mudd’s firsthand experience testifying before Congress. (Pro tip: Don’t forget to turn on your mic!)
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