In the latest update on its plans to replace third-party cookies for advertising, Google says testing on one specific proposal looks promising.
Google was planning to share some new findings suggesting the effectiveness of its “Federated Learning of Cohorts”, which is part of the Chrome browser’s “Privacy Sandbox”, in a blog post presented Monday. The “Sandbox” is an initiative launched in 2019 to find alternatives to the cookie, while reducing the impact on publishers and other players. In Google’s words, it’s about finding a solution that protects users’ privacy and keeps content available on the open web for free.
Not long after the initiative was announced, Google said it would end support for third-party cookies within two years from January 2020, which fuel a large part of the digital advertising ecosystem.
Chrome engineers are working with the broader industry, including the web standards organization W3C, on ideas in the Sandbox proposed by Google and other ad tech players. What is likely to result is that a number of these ideas are moving forward, Google says.
“This is one suggestion,” Chetna Bindra, group product manager for user trust and privacy at Google, told CNBC about the progress with “FLoC”. ‘This is by no means the final or the only proposal to replace third-party cookies … There will not be one final API going on, it will be a collection of it that makes things like interest-based advertising possible, as well as measurement cases, where it’s important to ensure that advertisers can measure the effectiveness of their ads. ‘
According to Bindra, the company is “very confident” about the progress with the proposals and the tests so far.
Google’s message Monday says that test results show that FLoC (pronounced like a flock of birds, in line with a number of bird-themed suggestions such as “Turtledove” and “Swallow”) is an effective privacy-oriented replacement signal for third-party cookies. . “It says advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of conversions spent per dollar compared to cookie-based ads.
FLoC will place people primarily in groups based on similar browsing behavior, meaning that only ‘cohort IDs’ and not individual user IDs will be used to target them. Web history and input for the algorithm will be kept in the browser, while the browser only exposes a ‘cohort’ containing thousands of people.
“We really see that one of these first Sandbox technologies for interest-based advertising is literally just as effective as third-party cookies,” Bindra said. “There are definitely a lot more tests coming up. We’re very keen for advertisers and advertising technology to get directly involved.”
Bindra said that these groups, which may include people who have behaviors such as an interest in gardening or rock music, still allow them to focus on these interests. However, instead of targeting on an individual level, it will target groups.
“The difference will really just be that they are no longer watching every user on the internet. There really is the idea of privacy for the users who are now merged within a group,” Bindra said.
She added that the figures from the FLoC tests should be reassuring to publishers. Chrome will then make the groups available for public testing with its next release in March, and expects to start testing FLoC-based groups with Google Ads advertisers in the second quarter, the blog post reads.
Myles Younger, senior director of global data practice at MightyHive, said Sandbox’s proposals are all about ‘how we can build new features in the Chrome browser to simultaneously address user privacy and the death of the third-party cookie retains brands’ ability to advertise effectively. “He spoke before Google’s latest findings were released.
One question is whether players are actually going to use it.
“I do not know if this is something that Google is capable of just turning a switch on and off,” he said. Publishers need to use it. People need to start using this system. [Google] must prove that it works. ‘
Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at CafeMedia, said advertisers and publishers do fear the unknown because it relates to what comes next.
“I think we all want to believe that it will be good and we all want to get to a place where users have more privacy and the internet works better,” he said. But given the complexity and technicality of the process, it is unclear what will really happen next.
He said there was a fear that these kinds of actions could benefit the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook, and not the ads on the open web.
UK antitrust authorities are also monitoring the plans and investigating whether the plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome could harm online advertising competition. The Competition and Markets Authority is investigating whether Google’s plans could cause advertisers to shift spending to Google’s own tools at the expense of its competitors.
In an email response, Bindra said: “The privacy sandbox has been an open initiative since its inception and we welcome the involvement of the CMA as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy, ad-supported web without cookies from third parties. “
Some privacy advocates are also skeptical about the “FLoC” approach. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2019 that these groups can be used in harmful ways so that discriminating advertisers can identify and filter out groups representing vulnerable populations.
“A herd name would be essentially a behavioral credit point: a tattoo on your digital forehead that gives a concise summary of who you are, what you want, where you are going, what you buy and who you associate with,” says EFF technologist Bennett Cyphers wrote in the blog post, “The herd names are probably unsearchable for users, but they can reveal incredibly sensitive information to third parties.”
Whether the machine learning group will create groups based on health issues or low-income status or other sensitive characteristics is for some the question.
“It could possibly do a lot of creepy and illegal things,” Bannister said. “How will Chrome protect against it?”
Google said in documents that its analysis evaluates whether a group can be sensitive without learning why it is sensitive, and said that groups that reveal “sensitive categories” such as race, sexuality or personal hardship are blocked, or that the grouping algorithms were reset to reduce the correlation.
Google has added that it violates its policies to provide personalized ads in these sensitive categories.
Nominations are open for 2021 CNBC Disruptor 50, a list of private enterprises using breakthrough technology to become the next generation of large public companies. if by Friday, Feb. 12 at 3 p.m. EST.