Measure user demographics

Content producers often want to understand the demographics of their audience. You can use Shared Storage to record user demographic data in a context where you have it, such as your first-party site, and then use aggregated reporting to include that data in reports from other sites, such as your embedded content.

The Shared Storage API is a Privacy Sandbox proposal for general purpose, cross-site storage, which supports many possible use cases. Private Aggregation API is an output available in Shared Storage that allows you to aggregate cross-site data.

Try user demographic measurement

To experiment with user demographic measurement with Shared Storage and Private Aggregation, confirm you're using Chrome Canary and Dev M107 or later. Enable all the Ad privacy APIs under chrome://settings/adPrivacy.

You can also enable Shared Storage with the --enable-features=PrivacySandboxAdsAPIsOverride,OverridePrivacySandboxSettingsLocalTesting,SharedStorageAPI,FencedFrames flag in the command line.

Experiment with code samples

You may want to measure certain demographics of the users who have seen your content across different sites, for example age range or geographical location. In this example, the content ID, age group ID, and the geography ID dimensions are encoded into the aggregation key (bucket), and the count is used as the aggregatable value. The summary report generated will provide information such as "Approximately 391 users who have seen the content ID 123 are between the age of 18-39 and are from Europe."

In this example:

  • demographic-measurement.js is loaded via a frame, and is responsible for loading the shared storage worklet.
  • demographic-measurement-worklet.js is the shared storage worklet that reads the demographics data in shared storage and sends a report via the Private Aggregation API.

store-demographic-data.js

(Runs at some point in time before the measurement is made to set the demographics data into Shared Storage)

function getDemogrationsData() {
  // Collect age group and continent data
  return {
    ageGroup,
    continent
  }
}

async function storeDemographics() {
  const { ageGroup, continent } = getDemographicsData();
  await window.sharedStorage.set('age-group', ageGroup);
  await window.sharedStorage.set('continent', continent);
}

storeDemographics();

demographic-measurement.js

async function measureDemographics() {
  // Load the Shared Storage worklet
  await window.sharedStorage.worklet.addModule('demographics-measurement-worklet.js');

  // Run the demographics measurement operation
  await window.sharedStorage.run('demographics-measurement', { data: { contentId: '123' } });
}

measureDemographics();

demographic-measurement-worklet.js

// Learn more about noise and scaling from the Private Aggregation fundamentals
// documentation on Chrome blog
const SCALE_FACTOR = 65536;

/**
 * The bucket key must be a number, and in this case, it is simply the ad campaign
 * ID itself. For more complex bucket key construction, see other use cases in
 * this demo.
 */

const AGGREGATION_KEY_MAP = {
  ageGroupId: {
    '18-39': '1',
    '40-64': '2',
    '65+': '3',
  },

  continentId: {
    africa: '1',
    antarctica: '2',
    asia: '3',
    australia: '4',
    europe: '5',
    'north-america': '6',
    'south-america': '7',
  },

};

/**
 * The aggregation key will be in the format of:
 * contentId | ageGroupId | continentId
 *
 * For example, a user from Australia between the age of 40-64, who has
 * seen the Content ID 321 will be represented by the key:
 * 321 | 2 | 4 or 32124
 */

function generateAggregationKey(contentId, ageGroup, continent) {
  const ageGroupId = AGGREGATION_KEY_MAP.ageGroupId[ageGroup];
  const continentId = AGGREGATION_KEY_MAP.continentId[continent];
  const aggregationKey = BigInt(`${contentId}${ageGroupId}${continentId}`);

  return aggregationKey;
}

class DemographicsMeasurementOperation {
  async run(data) {
    const { contentId } = data;

    // Read from Shared Storage
    const key = 'has-reported-content';
    const hasReportedContent = (await sharedStorage.get(key)) === 'true';
    const ageGroup = await sharedStorage.get('age-group');
    const continent = await sharedStorage.get('continent');

    // Do not report if a report has been sent already
    if (hasReportedContent) {
      return;
    }

    // Generate the aggregation key and the aggregatable value
    const bucket = generateAggregationKey(contentId, ageGroup, continent);
    const value = 1 * SCALE_FACTOR;

    // Send an aggregatable report via the Private Aggregation API
    privateAggregation.contributeToHistogram({ bucket, value });

    // Set the report submission status flag
    await sharedStorage.set(key, true);
  }
}

// Register the operation
register('demographics-measurement', DemographicsMeasurementOperation); \

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Note that the Shared Storage API proposal is under active discussion and development and therefore subject to change.

We're eager to hear your thoughts on the Shared Storage API.

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