Privacy Sandbox

In January 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, June 2022 brought yet another extension to the 2nd half of 2024, and in April 2024 it was postponed to the beginning of 2025. Moreover, Google Chrome declared withdrawing 1% of 3rd-party cookies in Q1 2024 to provide a reliable environment for testing.

Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share. Therefore—how will retargeting work without cookies?

Imagine a world without personalized ads. Brands would be forced to build generic messaging and throw it into the void, praying that it connected with someone. Customers would be less likely to find the products they actually want and forced to settle for whatever they happened upon online. Personalized ads help companies connect with people who actually want their products and save consumers from wasting their time on irrelevant content.

However, there’s a new challenge on the horizon. Consumers have become increasingly privacy conscious, and as an industry, we have had to find new ways to personalize our content to consumers while also respecting their privacy. This guide will walk you through personalized ads and how they will function as we move towards more privacy-friendly personalized ads.

Google Chrome set an ambitious goal in their January 2020 announcement to have the key privacy-preserving advertising technologies deployed by late 2022 for the developer community to start adopting them. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox and revealed a plan to phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

We now know that third-party cookies will be staying with us a little longer. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox – a high-level plan indicating that it will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

The question is – how much more time does the industry actually have? The answer is – not much. Based on the official procedures for bringing new features to Chrome, we at RTB House expect that the next two years will be filled with work.

Six months ago, during IETF 111, Google engineers made it clear that they were approaching a new iteration of FLoC, which was related to site topics. Yesterday, they finally announced Topics API. The ad topics concept has also been explored by Meta engineers in their Ad Topic Hints proposal, which builds on user feedback to displayed ads. Also, the PAURAQUE proposal from NextRoll was proposed in such a way that users could define topics which are interesting for them and can be used for personalization.

In 2022, Google announced that Privacy Sandbox will be expanded to the in-app environment. Google’s Privacy Sandbox on Android, or simply the Android Privacy Sandbox, is a natural progression of Google’s broader privacy efforts. It’s designed to provide users with greater control over their data and privacy, while still giving marketers the tools they need to connect with users and sell their products.

This article will explain how the Android Privacy Sandbox works and what impact it will have on in-app marketing campaigns.