Google said it plans to launch its own Android privacy sandbox program as more technology and app companies continue to come under scrutiny over user privacy and security.
The company said it plans to develop a more privacy-focused advertising solution that prohibits the sharing of user data with third parties and does not require cross-app identifiers to work. The feature will use Google's IDs to track and measure ad campaigns.
What about the detailed Google Privacy Sandbox policy?
The rollout will build on a privacy sandbox proposal that Google has been experimenting with and submitting to industry peers (not to mention regulators) for approval since 2020. Ultimately, the privacy sandbox seeks to establish a set of technical standards to enable ad targeting and measurement on web posts - now on the Android mobile operating system - after traditional targeting tools like third-party cookies are deactivated.
Google's initial Privacy Sandbox program, which launches in 2019, has the stated purpose of creating a collaborative, open-source environment in which privacy technologies can be developed into web standards. The initiative comes shortly after Google announced it would be moving away from third-party cookies in Chrome; the Privacy Sandbox is presented as a means of building tools and technical approaches to keep ads effective while protecting user privacy in a way that third-party cookies do not.
"Specifically, these solutions will limit the sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-application identifiers, including ad IDs," Chavez wrote in a blog post. "We are also exploring techniques to reduce the likelihood of secret data collection, including more secure ways for apps to integrate with the advertising SDK."
Google's Chavez further emphasized that "we believe it is critical to leverage these new technologies to work closely with the industry to develop new "privacy-preserving APIs" that do not rely on cross-application identifiers.
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What can marketers track under Privacy Sandbox policy
Ad identifiers are just tools designed for a certain purpose. Google intends to replace one very shareable tool, GAID, with four other privacy-safe device tools.
- Topics, for targeting the right ads to the right people.
- Fledge, for retargeting new ads to "old" people who may have shown interest in the past.
- Attribution reporting, used to tell advertisers which ads are working without revealing all the details about you and your campaigns.
- SDK Runtime, the firewall part of the phone, used to isolate advertising tools to limit their ability to see and record what people are doing.
Topics
The proposed topic concept for Privacy Sandbox on Android is very similar to the topic API recently introduced for the original Privacy Sandbox.
The details of the system are less interesting than the overall goal, which is to use on-device data derived from interactions with various apps (which have been categorized as belonging to different themes) to target ad contexts in a way that is not entirely based on them. The idea behind the themes is that the use of a particular app may be related to some interest of the user and that interest can be targeted by the advertiser in a way that is not available or computable by this theme classifier, given a much narrower view for the advertiser.
Theme systems on both Web and Android try to prevent cross-application recognition by 1) introducing random noise in the theme selection process (in each case, 5% of the time themes are evaluated against attributes and random themes are selected) and 2) assigning multiple themes to an attribute.
The implementation of the mobile application theme concept is fairly simple: different advertising SDKs integrated into any application on a user's phone can use the theme associated with any given application, but limited to that application, to populate the inventory in that application. This approach is more helpful than simply using the context of the app for targeting because Android is able to associate interests associated with that app that are not visible or perceived to any SDK owner, but personally identifiable information (such as device ID) is not used as the basis for targeting.
Google says users will be able to control the association of their app usage with topics. In addition, its topic classification is manually curated and allows sensitive topics to be excluded from use.
FLEDGE for Android
Similar to the theme concept, FLEDGE for Android reflects the recommendations made for the web in the original privacy sandbox. fLEDGE essentially allows retargeting and custom audience creation without federating data across a set of third-party ad tech vendors. fLEDGE allows advertisers to place users into target groups based on their interactions with their assets, and allows publishers to run ad The purpose of FLEDGE is to allow users to be organized into groups and for auctions to be managed entirely on the device, without the need to transfer any data to a group of ad tech vendors.
As with the theme concept, Google says users can control the custom audiences they belong to and which apps can group them into audiences. Ultimately, FLEDGE flips the directionality of the data flow in the ad serving process: audience classification occurs on the device, and the buyer platform submits its bidding logic to the device for reception by the SSP running on the device. For the mobile privacy sandbox, auctions take place within the app, and both the buyer (successful bids) and the seller can report auction results to their own services via the FLEDGE API.
Attribution Reporting
Similar to the first two concepts, the attribution reporting concept is a mobile application similar to existing web proposals. Attribution reporting might be considered the spiritual equivalent of SKAdNetwork on Android: it provides coarse, noisy, non-user-identifiable conversion statistics for ad clicks and view events, although unlike SKAdNetwork, it does so through two different kinds of reporting (event-specific and aggregate).
The purpose of attribution reporting in the Android Privacy Sandbox program is to allow custom audience creation and retargeting without the use of ad IDs that can (and must) be shared among various ad technology vendors.
By keeping all matching data on the device and displaying only successful conversions at the campaign level (assuming enough noise is applied to event-level reporting to prevent individual events from being matched based on time), systematic reporting concepts like Attribution (and similar implementations of the same logic, such as SKAdNetwork and PCM from Apple and AEM from Facebook) attempt to allow conversion accounting without revealing the potential attribution that makes it possible.
SDK Runtime
As a component of the Android Privacy Sandbox, Google plans to introduce the SDK Runtime in Android 13: a separate, dedicated runtime environment for in-app third-party SDKs that can grant different permissions than the app, allowing the app to control the data those third-party SDKs can access. Google in its Privacy Sandbox for Android documentation, states that the first iteration of the SDK runtime feature will focus on "ad-related SDKs," which it describes as "enabling ad serving, ad measurement, ad fraud, and abuse detection. "
With the SDK runtime, apps/games will be decoupled from the SDK they use. the SDK will run in a different, more protected environment and will not have the same permissions as the host app/game. the SDK provider will need to pass its SDK to the store through the SDK review process. At the moment of download, users will actually download the application/game and the SDK they use separately.
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App reviews and rating optimization
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How to Use App Reviews and Ratings to Your Advantage" of our previous articles.
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