Big Bird: Privacy Budget Management for W3C's Privacy-Preserving Attribution API

Privacy-preserving advertising APIs like Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) are designed to enhance web privacy while enabling effective ad measurement. PPA offers an alternative to cross-site tracking with encrypted reports governed by differential privacy (DP), but current designs lack a principled approach to privacy budget management, creating uncertainty around critical design decisions. We present Big Bird, a privacy budget manager for PPA that clarifies per-site budget semantics and introduces a global budgeting system grounded in resource isolation principles. Big Bird enforces utility-preserving limits via quota budgets and improves global budget utilization through a novel batched scheduling algorithm. Together, these mechanisms establish a robust foundation for enforcing privacy protections in adversarial environments. We implement Big Bird in Firefox and evaluate it on real-world ad data, demonstrating its resilience and effectiveness.

@article{tholoniat2025_2506.05290,
  title={ Big Bird: Privacy Budget Management for W3C's Privacy-Preserving Attribution API },
  author={ Pierre Tholoniat and Alison Caulfield and Giorgio Cavicchioli and Mark Chen and Nikos Goutzoulias and Benjamin Case and Asaf Cidon and Roxana Geambasu and Mathias Lécuyer and Martin Thomson },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05290},
  year={ 2025 }
}