Marketers were clearly relieved when, in June 2021, Google officially announced that it was delaying its cookie decommissioning project. I think that it should mobilize those who were not very interested in the subject before. But let’s start with the basics – what is this mystical “privacy sandbox” and what does it change in collecting and processing cookies? I invite you to read!

What is Privacy Sandbox from Google?

Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposal was presented in response to the withdrawal of cookies for third parties. Below I publish the speech of Google employees who presented solutions proposed during the Chrome Dev Summit 2019 conference.

Paradoxically, the privacy sandbox is supposed to be a “comprehensive” solution that will help maintain quality traffic for websites without third-party cookies. It is worth noting here that the change itself seems to bring a promise of positive changes – less frauds in the advertisement, controlled traffic generated by bots, displaying the content to the user who consciously agreed to it. Certainly, all the initiatives below are a coordinated action against Apple, which was the first to emphasize that privacy is an inalienable right of every user. The words were followed by actions – the latest IOS updates gave the user the ability to decline tracking on almost any website viewed from Apple devices.

FLoC, FLEDGE and other privacy allies

During the aforementioned conference, Google employees identified several of the most sensitive areas of their activities that required an enhanced “privacy strategy”. These are areas such as advertising and its measurability, attribution reports, first-party cookie protection and fraud detection. I will briefly characterize selected initiatives.

• FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) – according to official information, FLoC is a new initiative that combines all browsers in a common mission of displaying what actually interests the user; other companies have shown no interest in this initiative, in the face of which FLoC will be based on data from Google for Google. Below, there is a very interesting graphic that shows the user profiling path according to his interests.
• FLEDGE (First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment) – responds to the needs of remarketing and identifying users who were on our website or performed a specific action; the mechanism on which FLEDGE is based is relatively simple – ad targeting is based on the pages viewed by the user and the data remaining in the browser history of this particular user, therefore it is not based on cookies; all data is associated with the Google Chrome browser, not third party cookies.
• Trust Token – a well-defined strategy called a “trust token” is supposed to enable the recognition and elimination of fraudulent clicks and fraud related to privacy; Simply put – these are re-captcha mechanisms known and disliked by users; well, the creators probably never assumed that machines will learn many times faster than humans, and the simple question “are you a robot” is going to prove to the user that he is this robot after all.
• Privacy Budget – an extremely interesting initiative, which is to define the limit of information that one browser can collect about a single user; unfortunately, the reasons for introducing this change are probably due to the fact that some mechanisms have so far included in data processing, fingerprints with which we logged in to devices using the touchID technology.
• WebID – another and the last of the initiatives selected by me as part of the Privacy Sandbox by Google, it assumes that when logging in, each page is required to provide the user with a login method instead of forcing, for example, logging in using an e-mail address or social networking site; a great plan, may its implementation go as well as assumptions.

New age of privacy

The Privacy Sandbox project from Google has extremely up-to-date and user-desired assumptions, which were, in a way, forced by the change in the privacy policy introduced by Apple. Each initiative presented at the Google privacy conference has enormous potential, and at the same time covers most of the important issues in online functioning – protection of private data of users, the ability to decline cookie consent, cohort analyzes instead of based on the behavior of individual entities.

As it happens, however, the implementation of such large initiatives requires cooperation of all entities as well as openness to changes and adaptation of our activities so as to always act with the first and foremost protection of the user in mind. Finally, I leave very important dates, covering the stages of implementing the Privacy Sandbox from Google. And I will accept all your thoughts and comments with open arms. Read on soon!