Privacy is core to Meta engineering culture, and one of our fundamental principles is data minimization. We strive to collect and create the minimum amount of data required to provide service. One critical space we’ve identified across the industry is to avoid processing user data with identity.
Anonymous Credentials Service (ACS) is a service developed by the Applied Privacy Technology Team to provide a solution at Meta scale. ACS enables clients to authenticate in a de-identified manner. By eliminating user-id in authentication, we preserve user security and meet our data minimization goals. We accomplish this by decoupling authentication into a pre-auth phase (aka credential issuance) and a de-identified request phase where the de-identified request is sent with business data. In this talk, we share an overview of ACS design and deployment, learnings from reliably scaling up to heavy workloads, strategies to support multi-tenancy, and a preview of the future work toward integrating de-identified services with Meta products.