DataXu

Safeguarding Consumer Privacy

At DataXu, we believe it is possible to safeguard and advance the interests of both advertisers and consumers through data and its real-time analysis. We gather data and determine or predict user characteristics, behavior, or preferences, and deliver relevant ads in real-time. Consumers benefit from receiving more relevant ads and digital content experiences. Advertisers and publishers benefit from more effective advertising.

At the crossroads is privacy. DataXu works diligently to strike a balance: companies want to reach their audiences with relevant content and offer people meaningful, high-impact interactions. Equally important, consumers want digital experiences that speak to their unique interests and needs. In every situation, protecting consumer privacy is paramount.

At DataXu, we make a concerted effort to safeguard consumer notice and choice and ensure their privacy and anonymity is protected. We work hard to uphold the highest values in all our business activities, and our leadership and policies regarding consumer privacy are no exception.

We are an active member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and comply with the NAI’s Self-Regulatory Principles. We also fully support the Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) program, an initiative spearheaded by leading industry associations, and the efforts of the Better Business Bureau, to regulate behavioral advertising across the Internet.

Starting in August 2011, the OBA Accountability Program repeatedly tested the functionality, usability, and duration of consumer-choice mechanisms offered by a number of companies across five Internet browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. DataXu’s corporate website was part of those tests.

A few weeks ago we learned that the OBA Accountability Program discovered a minor issue isolated strictly to our corporate website. The “opt-out” link on our Privacy page improperly set a cookie that was only readable by certain sub-domains, resulting in a few consumers (less than .03%) receiving DataXu ads after they left the company’s corporate website. Upon notification of the issue, we immediately updated our corporate website to resolve the situation and be back in full OBA compliance. In addition, we expanded our quality assurance procedures to ensure that the opt-out mechanisms will remain fully functional and in compliance moving forward.

Trust and honesty are the bulwarks of our brand, as they are for our clients’ brands. We genuinely welcome your comments on self-regulation when it comes to privacy in digital advertising, so please send us your thoughts.

- Posted by Willard (Bill) Simmons on April 23rd, 2012No Comments »

Technology Note: Remote Procedure Calls using Apache Avro

By James Baldassari, DataXu

DataXu’s engineers are hard at work creating the technologies to create value for our advertisers. We process petabytes of big data to make hundreds of thousands of real-time decisions per second.

This is a challenging task, and we’ve been fortunate to be able to leverage many open source software packages to help us get our product to market faster.  In many cases, we’ve used excellent community-built open source ideas as a foundation, and built improvements on top of them.  This post, by DataXu Principal Software Engineer James Baldassari is an example of how we contribute some of these improvements back to the software community.

We hope that by posting this, we’ll get some great feedback to make our products even better!

For the non-technical: Avro is an open source program maintained by the Apache Foundation that facilitates communication between a client and a server. In advertising technologies, such as real-time bidding, there are hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of real-time requests per second between servers (for example, an ad exchange) and clients (for example, DataXu’s real-time bidding system). For many reasons, we believe Avro is a good technology choice for the OpenRTB project.

Please Click Here to continue reading

- Posted by James Baldassari on December 15th, 2011No Comments »

Three Reasons Why Apache Avro Data Serialization is a Good Choice for OpenRTB

I recently evaluated several serialization frameworks including Thrift, Protocol Buffers, and Avro for a solution to address our needs as a demand side platform, but also for a protocol framework to use for the OpenRTB marketplace as well. The working draft of OpenRTB 2.0 uses simple JSON encoding, which has many advantages including simplicity and ubiquity of support. Many OpenRTB contributors requested we support at least one binary standard as well, to improve bandwidth usage and CPU processing time for real-time bidding at scale.

After reviewing many candidates, Apache Avro proved to be the best solution.

To demonstrate what differentiates Avro from the other frameworks (the link to my source code is at the end of this post), I put together a quick test of key features. The following are the key advantages of Avro 1.5:

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- Posted by Robert Foldes on May 12th, 20111 Comment »