Google’s Privacy Sandbox is a plan worthy of a Bond Villain
1964’s 007 hit “Goldfinger” contained an interesting plot twist on the normal heist movie. Rather than steal the gold from Fort Knox, Auric Goldfinger planned to destroy Fort Knox using an atomic bomb, thus reducing worldwide supply and making his own gold more valuable.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox achieves the same outcome for Google. Google’s plans were explained by Justin Schuh in January 2020. Google’s own logged in, first-party data and Walled Garden - along with a handful of other US oligopolies such as Apple, Facebook and Amazon - will become unstoppable and the “Open Web” will be something you tell your grandkids about.
A License to Kill
The various Privacy Sandbox “solutions” Google proposes all provide less accurate information than cookies provide today. By only killing third-party cookies and attacking all technical alternatives under the guise of privacy, while leaving first party cookies untouched the value of the Walled Gardens’ inventory increases while simultaneously nuking that of their smaller rivals. According to the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) Google possess more of such data than anyone else.
Paragraph 60 appendix E of the CMA review quotes states.
Google is the platform with the largest dataset collected from its leading consumer-facing services such as YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Chrome and from partner sites using Google pixel tags, analytical and advertising services. A Google internal document recognises this advantage saying that ‘Google has more data, of more types, from more sources than anyone else’.
By increasing the “friction” for publishers and advertisers to freely work with third-party vendors that enable them to offer rival services, the Walled Gardens increase the barriers for their smaller rivals to compete, further entrenching their dominant market position.
Oddjob
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) supports Google. In a recent blog Simon McDougall states “We are encouraged by this [removal of third party cookies], and will continue to look at the changes Google has proposed.” Such a statement is short-sighted adding significant legitimacy to a damanging proposition.
The World of Email Identity Solutions is Not Enough
One proposed ecosystem alternative in response to this interference with third-party cookies is to ask consumers to enter in their email address before reading a publisher's article (see Economist), which can generate a cross-domain user ID that can be stored in first-party cookies (see IAB Project Rearc, LiveRamp ATS, among others). This is at best only a partial solution.
Given the increase in friction and reduced adoption from some privacy conscious consumers, not all publishers will want to ask visitors to disclose their identity to access free content. Moreover, for these same reasons, many brand websites will not force consumers to enter an email to read their content. Without a common ID to attribute which advertising from particular publishers drives the most customers, marketers’ measurement of effectiveness will be impacted. Even worse the ecosystem has multiple rival consortiums who each produce different IDs from the same consumer email, reducing marketers’ ability to control the frequency of exposure across publishers and further reducing the effectiveness of their media spend. In short it will be a mess and won’t work.
Most consumers will be subconsciously driven towards the convenience of Google services that they are effectively logged into permanently. Who really wants to look through all those check boxes and enter their email address to read an article they can get on Google News without the hassle? Privacy advocates are naïve to think otherwise.
Most advertising businesses competing with Google will go out of business as their inferior datasets will be unable to compete. Advertising businesses are not the only ones at risk. Even the large publishers who receive the consumer email will be negatively impacted.
Marketers will likely decrease how much they pay publishers in proportion to this decline in measurement accuracy and media effectiveness they receive. Thus, for the same number of impressions served publishers will earn less money.
For Your Eyes Only
Walled Gardens have already begun courting the largest publishers to host their content within their own Walled Garden, where they have sufficient scale and access to proprietary measurement signals (e.g., Google organic search activity, Facebook has “likes”, Amazon consumer-direct purchase activity) to monetize the content with their own golden signals. Indeed Apple’s News App does not allow these publishers to monetize their content any other way.
Die Another Day
Publishers might mistakenly believe they will initially benefit from having their content monetized within these “Walled Gardens”. Even if they did receive more revenue in the short run, by contributing even more data to the richest consumer data set in the world, what is to stop Google playing publishers off against one another via differentiated commission arrangements or other practices? Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative - which effectively offloads all publishers' content to Google – already does this to some extent. By skewing organic search results in favour of those publishers who adopt AMP, Google is the man with the golden gun, redirecting consumers only to those publishers who fall in line, allowing those to live and others to let die.
Open Web No More
Without access to the same quantity and granularity of data as currently provided by third parties, the solutions vendors provide to marketers and publishers will suffer. The barrier to generating revenue for smaller and new publishers will become so great they’ll have no option but to operate within the Walled Gardens of a handful of US controlled multi-national businesses. Journalists will be reduced to bloggers working for Google, et al.
Little Time to Ensure Tomorrow Never Dies
Advertisers, publishers and advocates of an Open Web should be very concerned about Google’s proposals. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), other trade bodies and the media are being far too slow in joining the dots around Google’s “Operation Grand Slam”.
A Quantum of Solace
Some apologists believe consumers will have a choice of browsers and hence they can choose a rival one. However, Google’s browser has an overwhelming market share. Brendan Eich – the inventor of JavaScript and former chairman of Mozilla – recognised this when explaining privacy-focused Brave’s decision to switch to Chromium stating;
WebKit lineage + Chrome market power => de facto standard
Google has dedicated more engineers and money than all their browser rivals. With Microsoft’s decision to adopt Chromium rather than Mozilla, Firefox is not long for this world. Safari is only for those that subscribe to Apple’s Walled Garden.
If Google proposes changes to Web standards under the guise of “privacy,” we should judge these changes by the outcomes they produce. If these changes help foster easier access to a diversity of opinions, which is critical for free speech and democracies world-wide, we should applaud them. Alternately, if they reduce the number of independent publisher voices, we should resist.
Stop Sky Fall
Comment on this post or better still use the links below to ask Google, ICO, CMA and the W3C (web standard body) questions about Privacy Sandbox and the impact it will have on an open web.
- Internet Advertising Bureau UK / US
- Web Advertising Business Group Github / W3C / Email
- Information Commissior's Office
- Competition and Market's Authority
CEO & Founder at World History Encyclopedia
4moCouldn't agree more. Still valid 4 years on!
VP EMEA & Executive Leader - Automation & Integration @ Cognizant. xPega // xSalesforce.com // xAmdocs - dual 🇬🇧🇫🇷 national
10moSuperbly articulated as ever James and all rather sinister. Keep up the good fight.
Battle-tested C-suite operator through periods of rapid growth
4yI agree completely that the current change will benefit the walled gardens, but as I continue my listening tour, I also am blown away by the innovation in the market and the robustness of the non-walled gardens. Will logins be enough? No. Of course not. I agree with you completely there. Only a handful of publishers will be able to systematically get logins at any scale, and only a minority of users will EVER log in to ANY site other than the big walled gardens. But publishers are finding other solutions - such as the 1st party data sets done in partnership with their DMPs, as well as some of the great solutions being thought up through Prebid.org. The reality is, the cookie dying isn't the thing causing the sea change right now. It's the /result/ of the sea change. The thing causing the death of the cookie is that /WE/ all innovated so much and created so many tactics for advertisers /WITHOUT/ taking the perception of the user into account to the point that we made the Internet "creepy". The IAB many years ago put out an ad campaign that it isn't creepy... but it is. Almost every non-ad-industry person I speak with says the same exact thing... it's spooky that they get chased around and they don't know why. And so Google really had no choice - with Safari starting to gain browser market share on the promise to protect consumers - to take a similar stance. Am I happy with the Sandbox? Not in the least... not as the core way to operate. But I am happy that there are multiple solution sets. On top of that... when I spoke with buyers on my listening tour, they all said the same thing: they are /not/ going to send all their money to the walled gardens, they will buy with as much granularity as they can... and if that means after some deterministic buying using models and even the Sandbox to get scale without deterministic data and attribution... they are ok with that. They lived in a modeled-paneled world before, and while they'll mourn innovation, they still want to support good content. The losers are the mid-tail commodity sites - as only the largest sites of commodity content (e.g. news) will survive... and tiny independent voice sites. Mid-tail niche sites and all larger sites will still survive and thrive - just in a new paradigm. That said... I will mourn the loss of the small, who will need to join a coalition - be it a walled garden like Google or Facebook or one of the open gardens like Maven or Leaf Group or Vox. Very provocative and well-written article!
Innovative Marketing Tech and Data Strategist | Expert in Programmatic Media , GIS for Marketing, AI Ready Data Design | Fractional CEO Driving Growth & Efficiency | Speaker & Writer on AI & Marketing Tech
4yThe publisher needs to ask for a users email once and then the publisher can store the email with the 1st party UUID. The act of asking for an email is also an opportunity to capture explicit consent. The email is PII and it solves for a ton of cross channel identity management problems that the industry has today with the reliance on 3p UUIDs, MAIDs and IP addresses. Marketer effectiveness measurement is challenged at first but it was never good to begin with, in fact the current accepted practices are more than not good they are very misleading. Marketers have been unable to run effective experiments because of contamination of test and control groups that were naive to cross platform identity, ad blockers and 3p cookie deletion etc. The end state is that marketers who have 1st party data will be much better at advertising effectiveness in the future than they are today as they embrace identity management and “large panel” sampling across publishers and marketing channels like open web, email, logged in email and custom audience in the walled gardens. IMHO. Anyone agree, disagree?
An intriguing post that highlights many of the consequences we need to keep in mind as we address the important issues related to the intersection of consumer privacy, data interoperability and freedom of speech. Every technology can be misused. To properly judge potential abuse, we should focus, therefore, on the use of the technology, rather than its existence. As we look to further enhance the architecture of the Web, I hope we spend more time first agreeing on how to measure whether we are truly making the Internet better. Without an Open Web, democracies around the world will be increasingly threatened by those who can erect barriers or restrict access to information. Last month’s revised draft of ePrivacy Directive explicitly calls attention to ad-funded access to this information as well as to the need to properly minimize data (e.g., anonymize through aggregation and pseudonymize personal data) to ensure individual privacy. I am hopeful we can balance these interests without sacrificing the openness that fosters competition and innovation fueling much of the Open Web.