Google’s choice to kill third-party cookies is ongoing and the latest idea pitched to solve this is called “Privacy Sandbox”. This alternative promises to cut wrongdoing tracks for consumers while keeping Chrome browser ads up and running.
How are they planning to achieve this with this alternative?
Keep reading this short guide our MyITGuy experts wrote to learn what their latest big announcement is about.
What is Google’s Privacy Sandbox and How Does It Work?
Google’s Privacy Sandbox is not a single proposal but a set of them to satisfy the tracking mechanism avoiding previous protection standards that its native and limited tools offered.
Now, the APIs will enable advertisers to receive randomized and quite anonymous data related to attribution (like a purchase) and conversion (ad performance) while users consume targeted ads in-browser without revealing their valuable, private information.
The latest must remain private and protected at all cost, all the time, even across sites.
This is achieved through the replacement of traditional cookies for new programming interfaces. While the Privacy Sandbox plan is still in the early stage, they already announced a “Potential Privacy Model” which sits in the following core principles:
1) Develop replacement solutions to support web use cases and business models without allowing users to be tracked across sites and preventing cross-site tracking that users are not aware of,
2) And phase out support for third-party cookies when new solutions are implemented.
To successfully transition away from third-party cookies and accomplish the privacy-safe, way, Google has been clear about needing the support of advertisers/marketers, publishers, and developers through the feedback on missing use cases.
Fortunately for everybody, Chrome and ecosystem stakeholders are working on specific adjacent plans which you can learn about today. W3C groups have mentioned at least 30 of them with different requirements and use cases. The most popular are listed down below.
1) Privacy Budget
Allows webmasters to get information about a user’s browser or device with a limited quota on the amount of information provided to not fully identify individual users.
2) Gnatcatcher
The proposal divides into two to limit access to user’s identifiable IP addresses
The first one is Willful IP Blindness which provides a way for websites to inform browsers that they are not connecting IP addresses to users. The second is Near-path NAT which allows groups of users to send their traffic through the same server.
3) Trust Token API
Conveys trust in a user from one context to another, to help combat fraud and distinguish bots from humans.
4) First-Party Sets
They allow related domain names, owned by the same entity, to be declared as belonging to the first party.
5) Attribution Reporting
Formerly known as API for evaluating event conversions, they correlate clicks or ad views with conversions and enable two types of reports: event level and group level.
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6) FLEDGE –
Descendant of TURTLEDOVE, it’s focused on the selection of ads for remarketing without third-party tracking.
While most of them seem too good to be released now, they’ve seen the light in the most recent Android update. This is Google’s Privacy Sandbox preview released in April.
Privacy Sandbox Preview on Android 13
Google Privacy Sandbox preview has been officially released. So now you can get an early look at the Topics API and SDK Runtime that boost privacy online, first on Android 13.
The tech giant announced an open beta of the Privacy Sandbox is planned to release on the Android Developer Preview program at the end of 2022. Their main goal is to make free services and online content possible for everybody without having to rely on opaque, digital privacy-erasing methods of advertising.
But not everybody is happy with this “multi-year” initiative. So far, it has been described by some as an anti-trust and anti-competitive measure. And Google has decided to address criticisms of unfair advantage with the Android Open Source Project, “assuring design and implementation transparency.”They said, “Android will collaborate with the entire industry and app ecosystem on the journey to a more privacy-first mobile platform, and one which supports a rich diversity of value exchange that benefits users, developers, and advertisers.”