Ease of use for less technical users to see what interest groups they are in, and opt out of

[npatty00]

1. Is there a console command for seeing what interest group segments I am in, rather than going into application > interest groups?

2. Similarly is it possible for a website to display all the interest groups the user is a part of and provide opt out buttons for each, or all interest groups?

3. Is it possible for a website to provide an interest group feature opt-out button, rather than having users dig through chrome settings?
   Thank you

[michaelkleber]

The user-facing settings for Privacy Sandbox are in chrome://settings/adPrivacy. There the Protected Audience API is called "Site-suggested ads", and you turn the whole API on/off, see which specific sites you were visiting when ads were suggested (i.e. which sites you were on when you were added to an Interest Group), and block any particular site from the IG joining operation in the future.

We've talked about ways to explain "what interest group segments" a person is in, and haven't yet found a good answer. The name of an IG will probably look like a meaningless string, not something the browser could expect to have any explanatory value. We've considered screenshots of all the ads that an IG is holding on to, but a bunch of practical considerations make this kind of difficult to implement. And opting out of a particular IG isn't necessarily a meaningful operation anyway, since a "different IG" could show the same ad.

That's how we landed on just identifying IGs by the most familiar label the browser has available: The website a person was visiting when they joined the IG.

This needs to be a browser control, not a website control, because of course the browser does not let a website find out all of your IGs! Doing so would amount to letting the website learn all of your browsing behavior, and the whole point is preventing that.

3. Is it possible for a website to provide an interest group feature opt-out button, rather than having users dig through chrome settings?

Are you asking about a site you're visiting (say running-shoes.com) offering a button that says "don't cause me to see running-related ads", which the site would react to by turning off the IG-joining API? That is possible — the availability of the join operation can be controlled by websites, using a Permissions Policy.

Or are you asking about a preference that you express to an ad tech company? We don't have a mechanism for that, and I find it hard to imagine how one would be useful: a person browsing the web and seeing ads doesn't know what ad tech played what role in the ad showing up, so asking a particular ad tech company to change their behavior seems very removed from what a person experiences.

[npatty00]

I'm still learning the PAAPI so that makes more sense - thank you!