Expected victims of this new paradigm, third-party cookies, which today still make it possible to drive a significant portion of advertising investments by making it possible to identify users and their behavior without possible control, are set to disappear.
Privacy Sandbox which aims to provide alternatives for the various marketing use cases relying on third-party cookies today, is the initiative of Google that is quite interesting.
Indeed, Google will not integrate any of the identifiers that it does not own. Its proprietary identifier is the source of its meteoric acceleration in the digital advertising market since 2016 and has been integrated into all of its products. One thing is certain, Google will not contribute to the emergence of an external user identification solution, even though it may meet regulatory requirements for collecting consent. The American giant will continue to operate its own identifier within its environments (YouTube, Chrome, etc) and this will also allow it to absorb the 1st party user data of its customers. But no identified data will come out of this closed ecosystem: all sharing of audience data and performance data from Google environments with the outside world will go through the Privacy Sandbox and aggregated data models. If, in a sense, this does indeed limit the risks to the privacy of Internet users, it also strengthens Google’s grip on marketing algorithms and on the entire advertising value chain.
It is understandable that the disappearance of cookies and the emergence of technical alternatives allowing the digital advertising ecosystem to keep its promise of personalization of the advertising message goes well beyond the reasons for protecting user data that Google covers in its advertisement.
