In July 2023, we reported the UK Competition & Market Authority (CMA) guidance to third parties – i.e. ad techs, publishers, advertisers on Google’s Privacy Sandbox tools trial. https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/investigation-into-googles-privacy-sandbox-browser-change
Yesterday, on 4 January 2024, Google announced its pilot phase, restricting third-party cookies by default for 1% of users (Mode B) on Chrome within the framework of its Privacy Sandbox commitments. Together with the test of the PS R&M APIs (Mode A) in November last year, these movements of Google tackle the CMA’s concerns. Particularly, the CMA considered that implementation of Google’s Privacy Sandbox could be susceptible to abuse of its dominant position.
Image & Source: https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/blog/cookie-countdown-2024jan
If you want to try these restrictions
You may test these restrictions in Chrome 121 and later versions by enabling the Tracking Protection feature: chrome://flags/#test-third-party-cookie-phaseout. It will limit cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default. During the pilot of Mode A and B, developers can apply a temporary accessing label for Chrome, which is Cookie-Deprecation value accessible via an opt-in HTTP header and JavaScript API. Google for Developers notes that this type of label accessing information stockaged on the user’s device. According to their instructions in Privacy Sandbox, the EU and UK Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) may consider that the accessing labels would be equivalent to the cookies. Therefore, their application may lead to an obligation to seek the end-user’s consent.
https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/setup/web/chrome-facilitated-testing#demo_and_testing
Challenges for ads world
According to the Wall Street Journal, the marketers, ad-tech companies, and web publishers are not well prepared for this change. Google introduced some alternative solutions – e.g. Topics APIs, Attribution Reporting APIs, etc., but nothing has been ready yet. It shall be interesting to observe the reaction of the CMA, and other competition bodies, DPAs, around the world to these solutions.
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