Last week, IAB Tech Lab issued its report that defined dozens of potential shortcomings with Privacy Sandbox, including obstacles it creates to simply serving different ad formats such as video ads. The Privacy Sandbox APIs, for instance, do enable publishers to configure their sites to support video ads, it just makes the process even more complex, according to IAB Tech Lab. Privacy Sandbox also changes how advertisers measure campaigns, which affects tracking how efficiently they spend their ad dollars.
Privacy Sandbox—everything for marketers to know
“Our findings highlight that the industry isn’t ready yet and identify multiple challenges to implementation due to limitations in accomplishing key advertising objectives,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, said in a statement last week, after releasing the preliminary findings about Privacy Sandbox. “Chrome is focused on providing discrete components that support aspects of use cases, but which ultimately cannot be assembled into a whole that provides a viable business foundation.”
What happens next
IAB Tech Lab’s objective with its report was to facilitate more conversation and testing around Privacy Sandbox, and it is reviewing Google’s latest response to the technical components that IAB Tech Lab studied, Katsur said in an email statement to Ad Age. “We've received valuable feedback from Google, which we are reviewing,” Katsur said. “It will serve as a foundation for collaborative efforts, ensuring that the diverse needs of all involved parties are met.”
The IAB Tech Lab opened a commenting and review period on its technical analysis. The problem for a lot of players in the ad industry is that Privacy Sandbox can’t replicate all the functions third-party cookies cover, but the project is part of a broad array of post-cookie technologies that are being looked at.
“I think we’re going to have to figure out how much of how things work today is going to define what works in the future,” said Amanda Martin, senior VP of monetization and business strategy at Mediavine, a publishing house that represents thousands of websites. “I think that’s kind of the friction point that we’re at, is how much does Privacy Sandbox change the open [real-time bidding infrastructure] stack or how much does the open RTB stack change Privacy Sandbox.”
In its response on Thursday, Google’s team reiterated some of its findings last week, when IAB first put out its critique, saying it had inaccuracies about how the APIs work. “Across all the existing use cases powered by third-party cookies today [mentioned in IAB Tech Lab’s report], we found that over 90% of the use cases cited can be supported by the APIs,” Wong said, “this does require the ad industry to evolve how they do things today to be more private.”
One specific qualm with the report, Wong highlighted, was that IAB Tech Lab referenced a desire to pass certain data through what’s known as the Protected Audience API. For Google to enable that, it would essentially allow for cross-site tracking of consumers, defeating the privacy protections. “You can’t just report on that without letting tracking happen,” said Michael Kleber, a Google Privacy Sandbox engineer.
“There are things that individually sound very reasonable [in the report],” Kleber said, “where when you put them together, you end up with something that’s actually very unreasonable.”
Google’s Sandbox team did identify points where they could work with IAB Tech Lab, such as work the industry group is already doing to improve the Attribution Reporting API. Google’s team also had encouraging words for the suggestions from IAB Tech Lab to include Media Rating Council, the independent measurement firm, to play a role in Privacy Sandbox’s future.