In 2020, Google planned to make third-party cookies obsolete, by essentially making first-party cookies through the use of what it termed Privacy Sandbox. The feature was touted by the tech company as a game-changer for privacy for users while letting publishers and ad-buyers target consumers and do certain measuring tasks in the background. Google has now slightly backtracked on those initial plans via a blog post on July 22, saying that it will keep supporting third-party cookies because its solution is not ready for release yet.
According to Google’s blog post, “Early testing from ad tech companies, including Google, has indicated that the Privacy Sandbox APIs have the potential to achieve these outcomes. We expect that overall performance using Privacy Sandbox APIs will improve over time as industry adoption increases. At the same time, we recognize this transition requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.”
The company continued, “In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.”
According to Business Insider, the partners Google alludes to in the blog post from Anthony Chavez, the VP of Privacy Sandbox, who expressed concern that Google’s feature was not yet ready to be released. Index Exchange, a participant in Google’s grant program, established to test Privacy Sandbox, released its own blog post on July 2, detailing the issues it saw with Google’s innovation. “With its current limitations, Privacy Sandbox may not be an effective solution yet for general use, or it may be too costly for tech companies to ready their implementations for general availability. There are major risks to publishers and the overall programmatic ecosystem that we must address to make it easier and more efficient to scale.”
They continued, detailing how Google’s requirements lead to issues with latency, “This latency is primarily due to the requirement for Google to be the top seller in PA auctions, which in turn requires all non-Google bids to be processed by Google Ad Manager (GAM) before an auction proceeds. All auction participants must also wait for Google to finalize the winning bid. Latency could be reduced by allowing other publishers and ad exchanges to compete directly in a client-side auction via Prebid. This would create a more level playing field and speed up web transactions significantly.”
According to The Verge, Google’s feature was blocked due to a CMA complaint filed by The Movement for an Open Web, an advertisement industry group. According to the group’s co-founder, James Rosewell, “We’ve long called for Privacy Sandbox to be allowed to compete on its merits. If advertisers prefer its approach and consumers value the alleged privacy benefits, then it will be universally adopted. What wasn’t acceptable was for a solution like this to be forced on the market whilst removing any alternative choices.”
In 2021, Wired criticized Google’s program as an example of “privacy theater.” Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, is supposed to hide users within groups of similar interests. However, Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher and former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, told Wired that Google’s project and its FLoC proposal will not solve the problem of surveillance capitalism. Instead, it leaves that entire ecosystem and its associated problems intact. “This doesn’t deal with the underlying problem of surveillance capitalism,” Soltani said. “It still incentivizes the exchange of personal information. It still incentivizes the harvesting of personal information. All of that is unchanged. The externalities around things like clickbait or around things like controversial content to generate more clicks and views, misinformation—all of those questions are still present and not affected.”
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