Zero Knowledge Advertising — How It Works for Consumers
Here is everything you need to know about ZKA — the new, better online advertising system created by Profila.
TL;DR:
🔵 Zero Knowledge Advertising or “ZEKE” is an advertising ecosystem where you can browse the web without having to share your personal data with third parties (advertisers, publishers etc.), but where you still receive relevant ads anonymously.
🔵 It is a concept developed by Profila and the Carlos III Universidad Madrid. For it to work, we at Profila have created our own Cardano-native token called “Zero Knowledge Token”, abbreviated as “ZEKE”.
🔵 ZEKE will compensate internet users who participate in this decentralized ad-delivery system for helping each other keep their identities anonymous, while also reducing ad fraud and the misuse of personal data online by businesses.
The online privacy problem today
A large part of the time you spend online (on social media and websites), you are being subjected to online advertising. The Ad-Tech market touches billions of consumers [we call them “people”!] and is fueled by (largely) unethically sourced personal data, including yours.
Your online activity is tracked and afterwards processed to obtain a profile about you, which reveals your preferences and interests. Conceptually, this is a good idea, because knowing your interests lets brands show you ads aligned to your interests.
However, the obsession for improving personalization has led to the development of a sophisticated and invasive tracking system where your personal data — along with the data of billions of other internet users — gets shared with and used by numerous companies (unknown to you) for their benefit.
This ecosystem even goes further than the online activity of people and, with the proliferation of smartphones, it is able to also track the physical mobility and places visited by an individual. Even though different stakeholders in the AdTech industry are aware of this privacy abuse, they continue to use it for their benefit.
There are several reasons that explain this behavior, of which the most important one is … money.
Online advertising is a lucrative business model, valued at USD 334 billion in 2019, USD 378 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 982.82 billion by 2025 (Mordor Intelligence).
However, despite all the tracking, AdTech stakeholders still largely fail to show you ads of real interest. The result is that many people consider online ads annoying and useless, often showing you ads for product you already bought long after you bought them.
The end of third-party cookies
One of the most important proposals to combat the misuse of personal data in the Ad-Tech industry is to eliminate third-party cookies, which is the most widespread technique to conduct — privacy invasive — tracking of people on the web.
Third-party cookies are the reason you receive an ad for sport shoes on Facebook, just after looking for sport shoes on Amazon. Each time you visit a website, important information about you and your activity on that website gets collected and shared with more brands than you realized.
You actually agree to this when you accept a cookie policy like the one below:
However, even the industry is starting to understand that there is a need for a privacy-preserving, alternative AdTech solution.
There is a very intense and still open debate about what is referred to as the “post-cookies era” in the context of online advertising. Different alternatives are being proposed, some of which opt for creating respectful unique user IDs that respond to the requirements of new data protection legislation, such as explicit user consent.
Google has announced that Chrome, which accounts for roughly 2/3 of the browsers market share, would cease the use of third-party cookies. This practically represents the end of the third party cookies.
We can find few recent efforts by industry such as the Brave browser, Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), or Personal Data Platforms (PDPs), that represent a clear step in the market towards (at least reasonably) privacy-preserving ad delivery solutions.
❗ ️While these pioneering solutions represent doubtlessly important contributions to the field, they still have some limitations.
For instance, some of them, like the Brave browser, operate as a walled garden, limiting their operation to specific venues. Other approaches, such as FLoC or PDPs, do not offer the possibility of running full-private advertising processes (a.k.a. Zero Knowledge Advertising) or enable auditability.
There is a need to overcome the limitations of the existing state-of-the art tech, which is what Profila has developed.
Zero Knowledge Advertising (ZKA) explained
ZKA is a new, simple and efficient privacy-preserving concept for delivering targeted ads, which combines the benefits of state-of-the-art proposals. It is described in detail in the academic research paper that Profila co-authored with Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, called “Zero Knowledge Advertising: a new era of privacy-preserving AdTech solutions”, available for download here.
The best way to describe how ZKA works is to explain the main functionalities of Profila:
- Cross-platform support
It is actionable in different venues (e.g., mobile apps, web browsers, video platforms) contrary to walled garden approaches. Each web-browser or mobile application that integrates with the Profila app will only service ads based on what you as a Profila user give permission to in the app itself.
- Anonymity by default
It offers two operation modes:
(i) Zero Knowledge Advertising — default mode in which personalized ads are delivered to you without sharing your data with third parties.
(ii) Consent-based advertising — this mode requires the proactive action of the user to activate it. You can explicitly select what personal data items (if any) you are willing to share with each advertiser. For this, you can use the Profila app (see section below “Consumers want control but lack the knowledge and tools”.)
- Consumer compensation
As a Profila user, you are rewarded for both your interaction with ads (e.g., watching or clicking), as well as for the data you voluntarily decide to share with advertisers.
- Consumer-created data
In the current AdTech industry, your user profile is built based on inference techniques such as, for instance, your browsing history. The profile resulting from these inference techniques have been proven inaccurate. Also, newer privacy-preserving solutions like Brave or FLoC still stick to the use of such inference algorithms.
Instead, our solution leverages self-declared information by the user — yourself. This strongly guarantees that ads delivered to you are very likely aligned with your own preferences. Additionally, our Zeke token will be used to reward you for building up an accurate digital profile of yourself, and for keeping it up to date (or “evergreen”).
- Auditability
In ZKA, we use cryptography techniques which generate irrefutable proofs of the actions performed by the involved stakeholders. In other words, auditing capabilities are natively integrated to provide safety an security for everyone — users, publishers, advertisers, and other AdTech stakeholders.
Profila — the tool you need to control your privacy online
Today, you have no control over the use of your personal data by companies online. Once your data is collected in the AdTech ecosystem, you have no control over how frequent ads are delivered to you.
That is why we created ZKA& Profila — to let you decide when to stay anonymous, when to reveal your identity, and how frequent you want to receive content.
We are implementing the ZKA protocol by default in to the Profila app, which means that when you opt-in to receive paid content for specific products and services you like, the brand that delivers this content to you will not know who you are.
They will therefore not be able to keep sending you information about their business just because you saw an ad. You can choose to remain totally anonymous. Brands will still have a guarantee that their content is viewed by relevant people, but do not (need to) know the personal information about the people who view it.
❗ ️However, for those specific cases in which you explicitly provide consent to share a specific set of data items with a specific third-party, such information will be shared with the indicated third party.
You may decide that a specific brand can have your personal data to deliver you a service. E.g. you have a car from Brand X, and would like to receive offers each year for winter tire replacements.
In this mode, you can explicitly select what personal data items (if any) you are willing to share with each brand. You can instruct each brand that has access to your data on:
- which channel they can use,
- the frequency of the messages they can send,
- the content of such messages/ads.
If you accept to see paid content, it will only be from the companies you authorized, according to your instructions.
How the Zero Knowledge Token fits in
The Zero Knowledge Token or Zeke will be used as a reward instrument to increase the user base and incentivize people to learn how to work with key (privacy) features that form part of this new AdTech ecosystem.
It will also be used as a payment instrument to compensate people who opt-in to receiving ads. Via the Profila app, you can opt-in to view (anonymized or consented) personalized brand content for which brands pay a part of their advertising budget.
Profila currently splits the ad revenue 50/50 with each Profila user. However, if you choose to be paid out in ZEKE, you will receive 60–70% of the brand’s ad budget (instead of 50% in case of fiat payouts). ZEKE token will then be used for these high-volume, low-value instant payouts.
Furthermore, ZEKE will be used to:
- compensate internet users who participate in this decentralized ad-delivery system for helping each other keep their identities (IP addresses) anonymous (through peer-to-peer technologies),
- identify and reduce ad fraud (through audit trails), as well as the misuse of personal data online by businesses.
Cardano (ADA) owners can vote for Profila’s projects on Project Catalyst
Profila is no stranger to Project Catalyst, a community-led experiment which funds projects that build on the Cardano blockchain. Under Fund5, we received funding for our privacy project called “Control your data — Privacy ledger”, which was aimed at integrating its privacy rights management feature with Cardano.
Under Fund6 of Project Catalyst, we received additional funding for 3 other projects, which all relate to additional privacy features that help people control their personal data and get compensated for sharing it with brands.
Since June 2021, we are working on the development of these projects and their integration into our mobile app.
📣 Vote for Profila in Fund7
Under Project Catalyst Fund 7, we are proposing a follow-up project to the previous Catalyst rounds called “Anonymity and data control with ZEKE”. In this one, we are looking to integrate our ZEKEinto the Profila app and other Cardano-blockchain integrations.
If you’re an ADA owner and are registered on the Catalyst app, you can vote for our proposal until the 27th of January. When logged in to Catalyst, you can find our proposal in Fund7’s Dapps and Integrations challenge.
We’re very proud for already receiving great scores from the community advisors (average 4,8/5). If you have already voted for Profila and continue to do so, we appreciate your continued support!
Sign up to buy our Zero Knowledge Token
The ZEKE sale started on 29 November 2021 and consists of 4 separate rounds:
- Pre-Seed (lasts until early February 2022)
- Seed (06.22)
- Private (06.22)
- IDO (11.22)
We have created 500.000.000 ZEKE on 22 November 2021 (“referred to as the ZEKE Creation Date in our Whitepaper”), which will be distributed as follows:
- a maximum of 28% will be offered to the public (8% in the Pre-Seed round, 8% in the Seed round, 10% in the Private round and 2% in the Public round- IDO on occam.fi),
- 30% will be allocated to a user incentive pool which will incentivize Profila users for certain activities on the platform and within the ecosystem,
- 15% will be allocated to the team and existing shareholders,
- 8% will be reserved for service providers and advisors,
- 10% will be allocated for future marketing activities.
The price of 1 ZEKE will be:
- $0.022 during the Pre-Seed Round
- $0.030 during the Seed Round
- $0.045 during the Private Round
- $0.075 during the Public Round
Both Seed and Private Rounds are foreseen to take place in Q2 of 2022 and Public Round on Occam.fi in Q4 2022.
If you are interested to take part , you can already join our newsletter and whitelist here.
