Google Updates Cookie Crackdown Timeline

The cookie countdown is coming into sharper focus, somewhat. The industry is working out how to offer more privacy-compliant ways to prop up the key pillars of digital advertising—including ad measurement, ad delivery and fraud detection—while staying on the right side of various competition regulations. Google-led Privacy Sandbox is at the helm of these decisions on the open web, with other industry stakeholders weighing in via forums like World Wide Web Consortium groups and GitHub. How Cookies Work and Why They’re Going Away In June, Google committed to allowing oversight of its replacement of cookies to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Several weeks later, and in order to meet anticompetitive stipulations, Google announced it was extending its timeline for killing cookies. Here's what to know about the update. Currently, four proposals submitted by Privacy Sandbox are available for origin trials (in selected regions depending on privacy regulations). These include cohort targeting federated learning of cohorts, ad targeting method FLEDGE and other delivery and fraud detection mechanisms. In total, 30 proposals have been submitted and are in the early stages of discussion and testing. Testing in the fourth quarter 2021: All four proposals—FLoC, FLEDGE and others—will be in testing mode in select regions for a small percent of traffic. The first FLoC origin trials closed during the second quarter 2021 when Google announced the extension of its cookie depreciation timeline. Privacy Sandbox is accepting feedback from the first trials to incorporate into the mechanism—such as making sure FLoC is compliant under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation—before incorporating it into wider testing. Ready for adoption in the third quarter of 2022: All four technologies will have completed testing and will be ready to scale across the open web. Stage one of phasing out support for cookies in the fourth quarter of 2022: Assuming the technologies have cleared the regulatory hurdles set by the CMA, publishers and the advertising industry will migrate to using this technology, a process which Google imagines will take nine months. Fully phasing out support during the third quarter of 2023: After monitoring the migration process, Chrome will phase out third-party cookies over three months. Google’s update stressed it is working on nixing more shady workarounds to privacy-compliant tracking, like fingerprinting. The long road to 2023 Rethinking the underpinning of digital advertising is no small feat, and it’s made even more complex by the agendas of each stakeholder. Reports note the clashes between tech vendors and privacy advocates in the W3C, while publishers and marketers are tense about putting their trust into giant tech companies that have their own business interests to manage. To square these circles, Google’s update notes that more time is needed to “avoid jeopardizing the business models of many web publishers, which support freely available content.” Several publishers have said that Google has been trying to understand the rest of the ad industry and encourage more engagement, but there’s still a long way to go. Until now, publishers in FLoC original trials found Google hadn't gone into many details of its plans outside of the blog post, but it has been lending guidance around publisher-provided identifiers, which publishers can send IDs to Google Ad Manager for mechanisms like targeting and frequency capping. While Google is showing more of its workings and is cooperating with regulation agencies, there are still unanswered questions, for instance, details around the next iteration of FLoCs are still scant. And of course, with so much work to do ahead of 2023, the goalposts could move again.

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Google Updates Cookie Crackdown Timeline

FLEDGE will be ready for testing Q3 2021

Lucinda Southern

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Lucinda Southern