In the latest update of its plans to replace third-party cookies with advertising, Google said the evidence for a particular proposal looks promising.
Google planned to share some new findings that show the effectiveness of its “Federated Cohort Learning” proposal that is part of the Chrome browser’s “Privacy Sandbox” in a blog post on Monday. The “Sandbox” is an initiative launched in 2019 to find alternatives to the cookie, while mitigating the impact on publishers and other players. In the words of Google, it was a matter of finding a solution that would protect the privacy of the user and allow the content to be available for free on the open web.
Shortly after announcing the initiative, Google said it would end support for third-party cookies, which feed much of the digital advertising ecosystem, to the Chrome browser within two years from January 2020.
Chrome engineers have been working with the wider industry, including the W3C web standards organization, on Sandbox ideas that have been proposed by Google and other advertising technology players. What will likely result is that some of these ideas move forward, Google says.
“This is a proposal,” Chetna Bindra, the group’s product director for Google users’ trust and privacy, told CNBC about the progress of the “FLoC.” “It is absolutely not the final or singular proposal to replace third-party cookies … There will be no final API to continue, it will be a collection of them that allows interest-based advertising, as well as for cases of measurement usage, where it is critical to ensure that advertisers can measure the effectiveness of their ads. ”
Bindra said the company is “extremely confident” of the progress of the proposals and testing so far.
Google’s Monday release says test results show that FLoC (pronounced like a flock of birds, according to various bird-themed proposals like “Turtle” and “Swallow”) is “an effective replacement sign.” focused on the privacy of third – party cookies. “It is said that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent compared to cookie – based advertising.
FLoC would basically sketch people into groups based on similar browsing behaviors, meaning that only “cohort identifiers” and not individual user IDs would be used to target them. Web history and entries for the algorithm would be kept in the browser, as the browser would only expose a “cohort” that contained thousands of people.
“We’re really seeing that one of those early Sandbox technologies for interest-based ads is literally almost as effective as third-party cookies,” Bindra said. “There will definitely be a lot more testing. We’re very interested in advertisers and advertising technology being directly involved.”
Bindra said these cohorts, which could include people who have behaviors such as an interest in gardening or rock music, would still be able to orient themselves based on those interests. Instead of targeting at the individual level, this would be targeting groups.
“The difference will be that they no longer track all users across the web. There really is this notion of privacy for those users who are now grouped in a cohort,” Bindra said.
He added that FLoC test figures should be reassuring for publishers. Chrome will then make the cohorts available for public testing with its upcoming release in March and expects to start testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads during the second quarter, the blog post says.
Myles Younger, senior director of global data practice at MightyHive, said all Sandbox proposals are coming to “how we can incorporate new features into the Chrome web browser to simultaneously resolve user privacy and cookie death third parties to preserve the ability of brands to advertise effectively. ” He spoke before the latest Google findings were published.
One question is whether players will actually use it.
“I’m not sure it’s something that Google is able to turn a switch on and turn it on,” he said. “Publishers should use it. People should start using this system. [Google] you need to prove it works “.
Paul Bannister, director of strategy at CafeMedia, said advertisers and publishers have a certain fear of the unknown as to what comes next.
“I think we all want to believe this will be good and we all want to get to a place where users have more privacy and the web works better,” he said. But given how complicated and technical the process is, it’s not clear what will really happen next.
He said there is some fear that such actions could favor the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook and not be posted on the open network.
UK antitrust authorities are also monitoring the plans and are investigating whether the plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome could harm online advertising competition. The Competition and Markets Authority is studying whether Google’s plans could cause advertisers to transfer spending to Google’s own tools at the expense of its competitors.
In an emailed response, Bindra said: “The privacy sandbox has been an open initiative from the beginning and we welcome the involvement of the CMA as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy website and supports advertising without third-party cookies “.
Some privacy advocates are also skeptical about the “FLoC” approach. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2019 that these cohorts could be used in a harmful way, allowing discriminatory advertisers to identify and filter out groups representing vulnerable populations.
“A herd name would essentially be a behavioral credit score – a tattoo on the digital front that gives a brief summary of who you are, what you like, where you go, what you buy, and who you associate with,” the staff technician explains. of EFF Bennett Cyphers wrote in the blog post. “The band’s names will likely be inscrutable to users, but they could reveal incredibly sensitive information to third parties.”
It is questionable for some whether machine learning would create cohorts based on health problems or low income status or other sensitive attributes.
“He may be able to do very creepy and certainly illegal things,” Bannister said. “How will Chrome protect against this?”
Google said in documents that the analysis assesses whether a cohort can be sensitive without knowing why it is sensitive, and said cohorts that reveal “sensitive categories” such as race, sexuality or personal difficulties were blocked or left. reconfigure concentration algorithms to reduce correlation.
Google added that it is against its policies to run personalized ads in these sensitive categories.
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