How can Privacy Sandbox work for your business?

Even though the end of 3rd party cookies has been delayed, the much-awaited changes are finally coming in 2024. The faster your business starts preparing for the cookieless future, the faster you will be able to enjoy the results. Thanks to Privacy Sandbox, this process can go smoother than you expected.

What is the Privacy Sandbox?

It’s a project founded by Google in August 2019, which is now being developed in collaboration with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its goal is to create a collection of standards and tools for both websites and advertisers that will allow access to users’ information while respecting their privacy. The beginning of the Privacy Sandbox can be linked to the disappearance of third-party tracking cookies, as the first aim of this project was to design alternative ways for advertisers to connect with users. After all, internet users became more and more concerned about tracking online and the accuracy of the data stored about them. Privacy Sandbox works on a solution that will appease all parties. It’s worth mentioning that Privacy Sandbox solutions are focused on both the websites as well as the Android environment. 

How does Privacy Sandbox work?

Privacy Sandbox combines various companies and contributors that aim to solve three fundamental challenges of the cookieless world. The first one is creating a replacement for cross-site tracking with the use of innovative and privacy-preserving technologies. The second aim of Privacy Sandbox is to allow both publishers and developers to deliver ad-supported content freely. And the third goal is to design new internet privacy standards while working alongside the advertising industry.

There is no one solution developed by Privacy Sandbox. Instead, we get a number of different proposals, which vary in their approach. However, they’re all linked by the same method stating that personalized advertising needs to be run through groups of anonymous users and not directly to individuals. 

What are the main Privacy Sandbox proposals?

Currently, we can pinpoint four main proposals, which include Attribution Reporting API, FLEDGE, Topics API, and CHIPS.  

• Attribution Reporting API is a solution that, instead of third-party cookies, uses a measurement of two events connected by the API to preserve user privacy. One is the event on a publisher’s website (user viewing an ad or clicking it etc.), and the second is a conversion on an advertiser’s website. 

• FLEDGE, a second Privacy Sandbox proposition, has a five-step process. It starts when the browser registers interest groups. Then sellers conduct an on-device auction while buyers provide ads and bidding functions. The browser renders the ad that won, and afterward, reports between the seller and buyer are exchanged. 

• Topics API allows the Chrome browser to determine the number of topics a user is interested in based on the websites they have visited. Information will be deleted after three weeks, and the new top subjects will be defined. 

• CHIPS is a solution that creates cookies for each site, not for each user. It enables identifying a user’s activity on a single website thanks to widgets and eliminates the chance of data leakage.