Google Privacy Sandbox does not convince, and the definitive farewell to third-party cookies is becoming increasingly distant: just a few days ago, it was announced that the final deprecation of third-party cookies has been postponed until 2025.
At the core of Big G’s decision are a series of challenges and reservations raised specifically regarding the proposed alternative solution, Google Privacy Sandboxby regulatory bodies, particularly the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of the United Kingdom, to which the Mountain View giant must respond.
Although the difficulty of finding a solution that can reconcile the need to preserve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on the one hand and user privacy on the other is recognized, Google Privacy Sandbox still raises many doubts and uncertainties.
Let’s try to understand why, but first, let’s clarify the solution designed by Google as an alternative to third-party cookies.
What is Google’s Privacy Sandbox and what technologies does it use?
Introduced in 2019 as an initiative involving numerous stakeholders over time, such as publishers, developers, ad tech providers, and consumers, Google Privacy Sandbox was conceived as a sort of frontier project created to find an alternative solution to third-party cookies that could guarantee better privacy for the entire web.
GGoogle Privacy Sandbox can be considered a true modular framework that collects a series of APIs allowing the delivery of relevant ads while enabling the acquisition of metrics and attribution of the ads themselves in full respect of user privacy.
Protected Audience API:
This allows for the management of use cases for remarketing and custom audience segments and is designed so that third parties cannot track users’ browsing behavior across multiple sites.
It is based on the concept of “interest groups” that allow segmenting users and are stored in the consumer’s browser and only accessible to the APIs there.
Topics
This API categorizes web pages into almost 500 topics of interest without revealing any information about user behavior data. It enables advertisers to publish relevant ads based on the context. It automatically generates a list of user interests based not on individual pages or searches but on generic data from the hosts they connect to. These interests are then mixed with other randomly generated ones to further enhance privacy.
Attribution Reporting API
These help measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns through more detailed data analysis. It is a set of features designed to obscure activities across multiple sites and apps, making it impossible for advertisers to track individual users and imposing a limit on the amount of data advertisers and publishers can link for event-level reporting.
Privacy Sandbox: Google’s assurances
As mentioned at the beginning, from its launch, many regulatory bodies have had their eyes on the proposed solution, and perhaps it could not have been otherwise given its market position.
Despite the challenging situation, Google confirms its full availability and commitment to resolving various reports.
In a statement released by Hanne Tuomisto-Inch, Director Privacy Sandbox Partnerships EMEA, Google reassures that Privacy Sandbox works the same way for all companies, adtech platforms, and that there are no preferential channels for Google’s own platforms.
It is an open solution in which Chrome and Android provide the basic components, and technology providers can incorporate them into their products.
Privacy Sandbox uses technologies aimed at strengthening user privacy protection through data aggregation, on-device processing, differential privacy, and data obfuscation.
End of third-party cookies postponed to 2025: is it still worth waiting?
Faced with a deadline that keeps moving forward, it is legitimate to ask whether it makes sense for companies, publishers, advertisers, and more generally, operators in the madtech and adtech sectors to adapt and undertake the significant transformation that leads to a change in approach in both models and strategies.
In response to this question, the answer is definitely affirmative. Although the deprecation of third-party cookies will not happen until 2025, already more than 30% of internet traffic does not support them, with all the consequent difficulties related to measurement and targeting activities.
Additionally, we must consider the growing interest of users in privacy matters.
It’s time to change the pace; the end of third-party cookies is an opportunity to seize to showcase your competitive advantage in the field of privacy: adopting an ethical approach to data that allows its value to be elevated is necessary.
Blendee is the solution that enables you to best tackle this change in perspective,offering the technological stack needed to ensure high-performing campaigns in full respect of privacy through cookieless-ready identity resolution processes, cross-site and cross-device functionality, audience profiling, data enrichment, audience extension, and the use of Privacy Enhanced Technologies, including the Privacy Sandbox itself.
