Protected Audience API

In this Media Review, you can read 6 stories, including big tech antitrust update, Meta letting users opt out of some targeted ads (and only in selected countries), and ramping the FLEDGE origin trial back up and launching isolated experiments.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

Cookies play an essential role in the modern internet. These small pieces of data stored in your web browser can do everything from saving login details to enhancing website performance to helping marketers show users products that they will love. However, not all cookies are made equal, and there are significant differences between first-party and third-party cookies.

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.

In this Media Review, you can read about Privacy Sandbox’s General Availability, rebranding of First-Party Sets and enlarging its scale, further obstacles in the way of tracking individual users across the Internet, and regulatory updates in Europe.

Google is coming for your cookies, and not the tasty kind lying safely in a tin in your kitchen, but the third-party ones that sit in your browser, watching, waiting, and storing all kinds of information. This has major implications, some good and some bad, for marketers and consumers alike. It also means that many of our old tools will soon become obsolete. However, you don’t need to crack open your tin of real cookies and start stress-eating yet. There are plenty of new tools on their way, one of which we’re going to get into today: The Protected Audience API.