Privacy Sandbox

In this Media Review, we bring together 4 stories, including the positive reception for FLEDGE, the French privacy regulator fining a game developer for leveraging IDFV (Identifier For Vendors), and the European Center for Digital Rights unifying the “dark patterns” interpretation in terms of cookie consent pop-up windows.

It might have been delayed, but the end of third-party tracking cookies is coming at the beginning of 2025, and businesses can’t afford to keep pretending otherwise. The good news is that thanks to this delay, there is still a small window of opportunity for companies to prepare for the cookieless future by engaging with the Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox.

As a leading buy-side platform, RTB House has been involved in the development of the Privacy Sandbox ever since its announcement. Being highly experienced in retargeting, we put particular emphasis on FLEDGE. This proposal has been in preparation for years now and has been available for testing in Chrome since April 2022.

We already shared our initial findings from the experiments in a previous article. It covered the availability of the elements for testing, our setups, and the initial results.

In this article, we would like to provide an update on the status of both the market and RTB House as of the end of January, give more insights and results, and share our perspective on the future testing and implementation phases.

Everyone loves a good challenge, but some are tougher to tackle than others. For marketers, the big one is the personalization paradox. 71% of consumers prefer personalized ad content, but 74% are also concerned about how advertisers are actually using their personal data. This creates a problem for marketers. They want to reach out to their customers with personalized content but often rely on tracking technologies that are considered invasive. Fortunately, there is an answer to this particular paradox. Brands can use data-driven strategy to leverage large anonymized datasets that provide rich personalization at scale without compromising on privacy.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

On April 18th, Google published the results from Google Ads’ interest-based advertising testing, where, among other tools, Topics API was analyzed. We are happy that the Google Ads team joined RTB House and Criteo in openly publishing findings from experiments with Privacy Sandbox APIs.

In the report, the Google Ads team compares the effectiveness of applying Topics API, contextual signals, and publisher first-party IDs instead of cookies for Interest-Based Advertising (IBA). Third-party cookies were allowed in this experiment for use cases unrelated to targeting, such as frequency capping and measurement.