The development of Google's Privacy Sandbox emerged from rising concerns around user privacy and data, prompting the need to deprecate Chrome’s third party cookies and find a viable alternative for it.
The decision to phase out third party cookies was disruptive for both Google and online advertisers. For Google it meant moving away from cookies that have been the biggest revenue earners! For the online advertising industry, it implied a change from the way they had been running their digital marketing campaigns since almost the beginning of e-commerce! Third-party cookies had long been the source for user behavior tracking across different websites and for retargeting and delivering personalized ads.
Taking into account the huge impact this would have,Google began developing a set of privacy-preserving APIs, known as the Privacy Sandbox. The goal was to create a more secure and private web experience for users, while also enabling personalized advertising without relying on invasive tracking methods.
How does Google’s Privacy Sandbox work?
Googles’ Sandbox is more like a collection of APIs that seek to provide a more private and secure browsing experience and yet allow advertisers targeted marketing without revealing individual data.Some of the APIs being developed as part of the Privacy Sandbox include:
Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC): FLoC categorizes users into groups based on similar interests. This manner of grouping people with similar interests together protects users by not revealing personally identifiable information. This allows advertisers to target groups of people with similar interests, while still maintaining the privacy of individual users.
Trust Tokens: These are digital tokens that will allow websites to verify that a user is a real person, without having to collect any personally identifiable information. Trust Tokens assign trust values helping identify bots from humans and prevent bot traffic and fraud.
Privacy Budgets: These are limits set on the maximum amount of data that can be gathered..
TURTLEDOVE: This is an API that combines contextual requests and interest group based data to enable retargeting .
Overall, the aim of the Privacy Sandbox is to create a more privacy-focused web ecosystem that benefits both users and publishers.