Publishers and agencies have a ton of questions for Google about its decision not to unilaterally drop third-party cookies on Chrome.
And Google can’t say much. But Google’s Privacy Sandbox product manager, Alex Cone, appeared on a virtual panel hosted by U of Digital on Friday to discuss in more detail (but not much more) the decision not to independently deprecate cookies from Chrome.
During the discussion – which also included Shiv Gupta and Myles Younger of U of Digital, Joe Root of Permutive and Therran Oliphant of EssenceMediacom – Cone said the Privacy Sandbox proposals as a whole and the specific timing of third-party cookie deprecation were never inherently intertwined.
The new Chrome privacy APIs will move forward, Cone assured.
However, although third-party cookie deprecation and the Privacy Sandbox proposals can be separated, deprecation was the forcing mechanism for Sandbox adoption. If third-party cookies remain widely available, advertisers, ad tech and publishers won’t rebuild their online advertising infrastructure.
Companies have been testing and implementing Sandbox APIs for months, regardless of the status of cookie deprecation, Cone said. The Chrome relevance and measurement APIs have been generally available since fall last year, for example, in advance of when Google began disabling cookies for 1% of Chrome users earlier this year.
The Privacy Sandbox may serve as a cookie alternative, but Google asserts it was never meant to be a substitute for cookies. Therefore, Chrome cookie deprecation and Chrome Privacy Sandbox adoption were never actually dependent on each other. (Regulators and most of the ad industry may beg to differ.)
Chrome Cookie Consent
Perhaps the most pressing question that both buyers and sellers have for Google or Chrome insiders is whether the new opt-in model will resemble Apple’s ATT framework, which essentially rendered Apple’s mobile ad ID obsolete for targeted advertising.
The publicly available details are thin.
“Our goal is to ensure users can make an informed choice” about the data tracking they agree to, Cone said during the webinar.
“We’re at work on those [user interface] designs, and we’ll discuss those with regulators as we advance,” he added. Beyond that, there’s “no new information to provide.”
This focus on “informed choice” could mean providing users with access to information about what cookies actually do and an easy, straightforward way to opt out of browser-based tracking – not unlike Apple’s ATT opt-in prompt.
In Chrome’s announcement of the news, Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez wrote: “We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice.”
A close reading of the text might linger on “elevates user choice” as an indicator that the consent opt-in will be made prominently clear to all users, not buried in the settings tab like the current data privacy controls.
Small changes to how Chrome approaches its consent choice system will have far-reaching repercussions for how many users choose to opt in and whether the data will be useful for advertisers.
Shoring up the Sandbox
Regardless of the opt-in drama, the Privacy Sandbox has plenty of work to do.
Early Privacy Sandbox tests showed poor results in large part because publishers and media buyers lacked the scale of cookieless Chrome traffic necessary to properly test for specific use cases.
But once Chrome adds an opt-in to third-party cookies, there will likely be a larger opt-out audience available to Privacy Sandbox testers.
For example, some testers said an experimental group of 1% was too small to understand the Sandbox’s impact on supply and demand, including CPMs and fill rates. An opt-in to third-party cookies could mean half of all traffic becomes cookieless and open for testing, going by opt-in numbers from Apple ATT.
Google still has no timeline or idea for when it will disable cookies for more Chrome users beyond the initial 1% testing group. And it’s too soon to say how quickly Google expects future opt-out rates to create sizable cookieless audiences.
“We have not shared a timeline around any sort of ramp-up. No new information to share on that,” Cone said.
But in terms of Privacy Sandbox testing, he added, “this is something we’ve been investing in for lots and lots of months, so you can expect that we will continue to work with the industry on adopting [Privacy Sandbox] APIs and helping coordinate testing as much as we can.”