Speaking of agreements, in order for publishers to agree to sell their inventory in digital auctions and for buyers to work with tech vendors, there are typically contracts in place. But with Privacy Sandbox, the browser and device will be an active participant in the auction, but there is no infrastructure for commercial agreements between the browser and other market participants, IAB Tech Lab noted.
Privacy Sandbox makes auctions run too slow
Privacy Sandbox runs auctions on users’ devices, making them slower than the auctions that run today via third-party cookies websites. This means websites could load slower for consumers.
Criteo said latency on Privacy Sandbox traffic is 100% higher than auctions run without third-party cookies. At the same time, NextRoll found that the average bid response for Privacy Sandbox was five times greater than the upper limit of what the company would accept for auctions currently run via third-party cookies.
Mediavine said in March that its tests found that Privacy Sandbox auctions resulted in an average increase of 1,500 milliseconds of additional load time. Index Exchange said Privacy Sandbox auctions increased latency by 28%, pointing to Google’s requirement that its sell-side tech, Google Ad Manager, processes all bids before the auctions start.
A Google spokesperson said Privacy Sandbox does not give GAM any functionality that other supply-side platforms can’t access.
Privacy Sandbox appears opaque
While we’re on the topic of Google’s role in the auctions, even if GAM doesn’t win the bid, many of the firms testing Sandbox question whether the world’s largest advertising company is putting its thumb on the scale for its new programmatic paradigm.
Adtech firms that don’t want to run auctions on devices, which can make auctions slower, can use a trusted execution environment (a cloud-based infrastructure maintained by one organization that securely runs code developed by a different organization) to run a server-side auction. But adtech firms are only allowed to use the trusted execution environment on either Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, Index Exchange noted.
Currently, Index Exchange runs this function internally, but now, it would have to pay Google or Amazon.
Plus, Chrome hasn’t addressed how it will make Privacy Sandbox available to audits from third parties or who will govern the use of the tech to make sure it stays in line with industry regulations, IAB Tech Lab noted.
“Chromium is open-source,” the Google spokesperson said, referring to the name of the browser project behind Chrome. “Anyone who wants to understand how the APIs work can view the code, including entities that offer accreditation and auditing.” The spokesperson added that Google is working on a future governance model.