Internet giant Google announced Tuesday that it plans to roll out a beta of its Privacy Sandbox for Android to mobile devices running Android 13 early next year.
“The Privacy Sandbox Beta will be available to ad tech and app developers who want to test ad-related APIs as part of their solutions,” the company said. Said.
To do so, developers must complete a registration process to take advantage of advertising-related APIs such as: topic, FledgeWhen Attribution report.
Topics, which replaced Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) earlier this year, aims to categorize users’ interests into different “topics” based on their device’s web browsing history. These inferred interests are shared with marketers to serve targeted advertising.
FLEDGE and attribution reports, on the other hand, enable custom audience targeting and help with measurement. Ad conversion Each does not rely on cross-party user identifiers.
Organizations can also request access to a limited number of devices to test betas or register apps that utilize the Privacy Sandbox API.
The development comes after the search and advertising giant expanded its initiative to include the mobile operating system in February 2022, followed up with a developer preview in May 2022.
privacy sandbox effort Google is leading the way in creating a set of web standards for websites to access user information without violating privacy. It is intended to facilitate online advertising without resorting to invasive methods such as third-party tracking cookies or fingerprinting.
That said, the company’s plans to turn off third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser have been delayed twice, and the technology is scheduled to be phased out in late 2024.
Complicating matters further, the proposal has been criticized by rival browser vendors such as Mozilla Firefox and developers of other Chromium-based browsers such as Brave, Opera and Vivaldi. new way It would solidify “Google’s position as a web monopoly.”
DuckDuckGo, which blocks privacy sandboxing via a Chrome browser extension as of May 2022, said that Topics allows Google to monitor users’ online activity and share that information with advertisers for behavioral targeting. can be shared with advertisers without their consent.
“This targeting, regardless of how it is done, can be manipulated (e.g. exploiting personal vulnerabilities), discriminatory (e.g. people who do not see employment opportunities based on their personal profile), filter bubbles ( (e.g. creating echo chambers that divide people), which many people want to avoid,” the company said. I got it.
Despite the backlash, Google said it was looking to engage with the broader ecosystem and collect “ongoing feedback as we move into this next phase of testing.”
