Attribution Reporting APIĪttribution Reporting is Google’s solution for private, aggregate-level ad attribution. Look for a deep-dive blog post on this proposal in the coming weeks. This will make it possible for vendors to roll out minor updates (bug fixes, security patches, etc.) without requiring developers to issue a new version of the app each time. There are also other benefits to this approach: a big one is that SDKs can be distributed and updated separately from the app itself.
But by isolating the SDK code from the app itself, Google will be able to sidestep those challenges with a technical solution that makes it impossible for an SDK to collect data it shouldn’t need.
So far, the only option for this has been policy enforcement. On iOS, one of the challenges Apple has had with enforcement of the AppTrackingTransparency policy is finding a way to prevent bad actors from collecting too much data. It’s an ingenious solution that will effectively isolate the execution of SDK code from the rest of the app.
The SDK Runtime is the only component of Privacy Sandbox on Android that doesn’t have a parallel in the web version of Privacy Sandbox. The latter two proposals deal primarily with ad targeting, so I won’t go into them in depth with this post - if you’re interested, you can find a great rundown of the details here. This makes it possible to show customized ads to users based on their prior app activity, without needing to share data with third parties. This facilitates interest-based ads personalization, also without relying on user-level identifiers. This is an API for measurement of ad performance without the need for user-level identifiers (like the GAID). This is a new framework designed to provide a safer way for apps to integrate with third-party SDKs. There are four ‘design proposals’ in Privacy Sandbox on Android: Screenshot from Privacy Sandbox on Android website, February 16, 2022 There’s no need for immediate concern, and we’ll all have plenty of time to prepare. Google is eager to note that none of these changes are coming imminently: the current techniques (including GAID access) won’t change for at least the next two years, and beta releases of the new technologies aren’t expected until late in 2022. Now, it’s no longer just about third-party cookies - the Google Advertising ID (GAID) is also in scope, and this starts to look a lot like the privacy updates Apple introduced with iOS 14.
Privacy Sandbox on Android is an expansion of that original initiative to also cover native Android apps. This original version focused on Chrome, with the intention of developing replacements for third-party cookies on the web, and is what gave us proposals like FLoC (recently revised into Topics). Google first introduced Privacy Sandbox several years ago. In this blog post, I’m going to recap what Privacy Sandbox is, share some early thoughts on what it means for mobile linking and measurement, and give you a preview of what to expect over the next few months. This is the much-anticipated counterpart to Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes (AppTrackingTransparency and SKAdNetwork), but there are a number of things about Privacy Sandbox that will hopefully make this situation different from the IDFA Apocalypse of 2020. Earlier today, Google announced Privacy Sandbox on Android.