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In the latest update on its plans to replace third-party cookies for advertising purposes, Google said testing on a particular proposal looks promising.
Google is expected to share some new findings showing the effectiveness of its “Federated Learning of Cohorts” proposal that is part of the Chrome browser “Privacy Sandbox” in a blog post posted Monday. The “Sandbox” is an initiative launched in 2019 to find alternatives to cookies while reducing the impact on publishers and other players. In Google’s words, it was about finding a solution that both protects user privacy and allows content to remain available for free on the open web.
Shortly after announcing the initiative, Google said it would end support for third-party cookies, which power much of the digital advertising ecosystem, in its Chrome browser within two years. as of January 2020.
Chrome engineers have worked with the wider industry, including with the W3C web standards organization, on sandbox ideas that have been proposed by Google and other ad technology players. According to Google, it will likely result in a number of these ideas.
“It’s a proposition,” Chetna Bindra, group product manager for user trust and privacy at Google, told CNBC of the progress of “FLoC.” “This is absolutely not the final or singular proposition to replace third-party cookies … There won’t be a final API going forward, it will be a collection of them that will enable things like the interest-based advertising, as well as for measurement use cases, where it is critical to be able to ensure that advertisers can measure the effectiveness of their ads. ”
Bindra said the company was “extremely confident” about the progress of the proposals and testing so far.
Google’s post on Monday said test results show FLoC (pronounced like a flock of birds, in line with a number of bird-themed proposals such as “Turtledove” and “Swallow”) is “a signal effective privacy-focused replacement for third-party cookies. ”He says advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of conversions per dollar spent compared to cookie-based advertising.
FLoC would essentially place people into groups based on similar browsing behaviors, meaning that only “cohort IDs” and not individual user IDs would be used to target them. Web history and entries for the algorithm would be kept on the browser, with the browser exposing only a “cohort” containing thousands of people.
“We’re really finding that one of those early sandbox technologies for interest-based advertising is literally almost as effective as third-party cookies,” Bindra said. “There is definitely a lot more testing to come. We really want advertisers and ad techs to engage directly.”
Bindra said those cohorts, which could include people with behaviors such as gardening or rock music, would still allow for targeting based on those interests. Instead of targeting at the individual level, it would target groups.
“The difference will just be that now they don’t follow all the users on the web anymore. There really is that notion of privacy for the users who are now grouped into a cohort,” Bindra said.
She added that FLoC’s test numbers should reassure publishers. Next, Chrome will make the cohorts available for public testing with its next release in March, and plans to start testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in the second quarter, the blog says.
Myles Younger, senior director of global data practice at MightyHive, said the Sandbox proposals are all aimed at “how can we build new functionality into the Chrome web browser to simultaneously resolve user privacy and cookie death. third parties while preserving brands’ ability to advertise effectively. ”He spoke ahead of the publication of Google’s latest findings.
One question is whether players will actually use it.
“I’m not sure it’s something that Google is able to just flip a switch on and turn it on,” he said. “Publishers have to use it. People have to start using this system. [Google] must prove that it works. ”
Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at CafeMedia, said advertisers and publishers have some fear of the unknown when it comes to the sequel.
“I think we all want to believe this will be a good thing and we all want to come to a place where users have more privacy and the web works better,” he said. But given the complexity and technicality of the process, we don’t really know what will happen next.
He said there was some fear that these types of actions could benefit the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook, and move away from advertising on the open web.
UK antitrust authorities are also keeping an eye on the plans and examining whether Chrome’s third-party cookie removal plan could hurt online advertising competition. The Competition and Markets Authority is examining whether Google’s plans could lead advertisers to shift their spending to Google’s own tools to the detriment of its competitors.
In an email response, Bindra said: “The Privacy Sandbox has been an open initiative from the start and we welcome CMA’s involvement as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy website. and advertising supported without third-party cookies. “
Some privacy advocates are also skeptical of the “FLoC” approach. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2019 that these cohorts could be used in detrimental ways, allowing discriminatory advertisers to identify and filter groups representing vulnerable populations.
“A herd name would basically be a behavioral credit score: a tattoo on your digital forehead that succinctly sums up who you are, what you love, where you’re going, what you buy and who you partner with,” Staff Technologist from EFF Bennett Cyphers wrote in the blog post. “The herd names will likely be impenetrable to users, but could reveal incredibly sensitive information to third parties.”
Whether machine learning would create cohorts based on health issues, low income status, or other sensitive attributes is a question for some.
“It can potentially do some very scary and arguably illegal things,” Bannister said. “How will Chrome protect itself from this?”
Google has said in documents that its analysis assesses whether a cohort may be sensitive without knowing why it is sensitive, and said cohorts that reveal “sensitive categories” such as race, sexuality or personal difficulties have been blocked. or that the clustering algorithms have been reconfigured to reduce correlation.
Google added that it was against its policies to serve personalized ads on these sensitive categories.
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