The advertising industry is turning to Google to save it from the chaos of cookie deprecation that Google itself created.
All eyes are on the Privacy Sandbox. Much has been said about the advertising use cases it enables, but hardly anything on what it restricts.
However, the devil is in the details. Out of the 15 features bundled in the Privacy Sandbox, 12 are restrictive by nature and have the potential to stifle ad tech innovation and disrupt many advertising use cases.
Privacy-conscious or anti-competitive?
Let’s take a closer look at two of these features: Fenced Frames and IP Protection.
The Fenced Frames initiative partitions access to data to disable cross-site data sharing. The use of the HTML element <fencedframe> restricts the flow of information and creates a silo that is only accessible through the Privacy Sandbox.
To gain access, all website owners and third parties would need to use Privacy Sandbox and enter through the fenced frame. Topics, Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting are then used to extract aggregated information from inside this silo, sharing what happens inside the “Privacy Black Box.”
In other words, Google decides what information is shared, undermining brands’ ability to access data they need to support crucial use cases such as measurement and attribution outside of the Sandbox fence. It’s another example of how cookie deprecation has become an opportunity for Google to tilt the playing field in its favor while hiding behind the guise of privacy conscientiousness.
Google’s IP Protection is another proposal that deserves more attention. Designed to enhance privacy and control by minimizing the risk of unauthorized identification and data leakage for publishers, IP Protection resembles Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari.
Although IP Protection is expected to have a limited impact on addressability solutions that rely on consent or first-party integrations with publishers, it might have a disruptive impact on media owners and advertisers.
IP addresses play a crucial role in fraud detection and geo-targeting use cases. Many companies choose not to run advertisements in certain jurisdictions for regulatory reasons. Blocking IP address sharing by default could make these use cases obsolete.
Hope on the horizon
Amid all of this, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has emerged as an unlikely hero. The CMA’s goal is to maintain a competitive environment, specifically ensuring the Privacy Sandbox doesn’t give Google an advantage.
Although the CMA has been evaluating all features within the Privacy Sandbox, the focus has been placed on the effectiveness of the Protected Audience and Topics APIs Google released to support some advertising use cases like audience targeting and retargeting.
But, to ensure fair competition, the CMA must also scrutinize smaller features bundled in the broader Sandbox road map and the impact these features might have.
Unraveling Google’s web
There is another important aspect of the Privacy Sandbox that has been overlooked. Google has linked the Privacy Sandbox with cookie deprecation. This means that if the Privacy Sandbox fails to deliver, Google can hide behind the CMA to postpone its timeline once again and keep the industry in a state of flux.
On the other hand, if Google’s framework works well, marketers and publishers will rely even more on the tech giant for their advertising activities.
Either way, Google comes out ahead.
Fostering competition in the post-cookie world requires disconnecting Privacy Sandbox from cookie deprecation, scrutinizing it meticulously and treating it for what it is: one of the many frameworks supporting addressable and measurable advertising.
This way, we can release some of the pressure applied by Google’s iron fist and build a competitive and innovative ecosystem for marketers and publishers.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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