‘Time to shake this off’: What Google’s Privacy Sandbox pivot means for publishers

A big shrug.

That’s how the ad industry largely responded when Google announced on Oct. 17 — buried in the fifth paragraph of a blog post by Privacy Sandbox Vice President Anthony Chavez — that it was retiring many of its Privacy Sandbox technologies, effectively crippling what was its cookies alternative.

Chavez cited “ecosystem feedback” and “low levels of adoption” for the decision.

Vlad Chubakov, associate director of programmatic at Delve Deeper, said that the announcement validates alternatives that the industry has focused on amid Google’s cookie flip-flopping, such as first-party IDs, contextual enrichment and clean-room-based measurement.

“Privacy Sandbox was never really alive in the first place,” Chubakov told The Current. “It was a half step between what Google wanted for Chrome and what the ecosystem actually needed. Most publishers and advertisers built their own work-arounds long ago.”

This didn’t come out of nowhere

The writing may have been on the wall for Privacy Sandbox’s demise.

Back in April, after years of promising to phase out third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, Google said it was maintaining how it approaches the tech rather than rolling out a new stand-alone prompt.

The pivot came days after a U.S. federal judge ruled Google illegally held a monopoly over two ad tech product markets.

At the time, Google said it would “continue to work with the ecosystem on determining how these [Privacy Sandbox] technologies can best serve the industry and consumers.” Apparently, the best way is by phasing them out?

Nevertheless, Justin Wohl, vice president of strategy at Aditude, said that the Privacy Sandbox announcement was “immaterial to publisher monetization.”

Christine Foster, senior vice president of commercial strategy and operations at Kroger’s 84.51°, previously told The Current that first-party data, not third-party cookies, were “the most trusted and effective means to reach relevant audiences.

“Time to shake this off and for publishers to get back to focusing on engaging with and retaining their remaining human audience who haven’t switched to browsing via chatbots,” Wohl told The Current.

“The advertising opportunities against this audience will continue to be a source of programmatic revenue for publishers and should be as measurable and addressable as a site’s relationship with their reader allows.”

Is Privacy Sandbox dead or undead?

Not everyone is fully convinced of Privacy Sandbox’s complete irrelevance. In the blog post, Chavez said that Google would continue to support some functions of Privacy Sandbox. Some experts say these tools hearken back to third-party operability or will create further privacy risks.

“The danger is that Google has managed to persuade the world that Sandbox is completely dead,” Movement for an Open Web Co-Founder James Rosewell told The Current. “But, zombie like, some of its remains survive to present an ongoing threat to open web publishers.”

Don Marti, an adviser for the nonprofit Consumer Reports and former vice president of ecosystem innovation at Raptive, is skeptical of Google’s effort to continue work on an attribution web standard — a proposed way to measure ad performance without third-party cookies.

“That project lacks meaningful protections against fraud,” Marti speculated, “so it creates a lot of real privacy risks for users.”