Recently Postindustria in partnership with MOW and IAB Tech Lab conducted practical and design research on the Privacy Sandbox initiative dedicated to satisfying industry needs after the final deprecation of third-party cookies.
In this post, we will cover some critical points of this journey and provide you with direct links to the case studies, product and engineering documentation, and industry conclusions based on deep tech analysis.
The general point that we noticed is the volume of upcoming changes. All players in the industry – publishers and advertisers, small and large businesses will have to adapt to the new tools. Even those who do not want to integrate the Privacy Sandbox. And since the number of introduced changes is huge, everyone shouldn’t spend time relying on the other cycle of postponement but start implementing, and experimenting. Now is a perfect time to start prepping your tech stack.
As you may have heard, at the beginning of February, the IAB released a document called Privacy Sandbox – Fit Gap Analysis for Digital Advertising. Postindutia was honored to work on it in partnership with the Movement for an Open Web. We made a technical review of such explainers and specifications as:
The research and assessment were focused on the industry use cases in the five major areas:
The deep tech analysis performed by Postindustria helped to define the real state, possibilities, and usage of the framework and helped to state the business impact in the studied fields:
Of course, you can find more details in the original document that we strongly suggest to read to all industry experts.
Related WebSite Sets (RWS) is one of the frameworks introduced in the scope of Privacy Sandbox which is dedicated to allowing access to third-party cookies for sites that submit their relationship by registering in the list consumed by all browsers.
In fact, the RWS is a wrapper around the Storage Access API (SAA) with a small extension. SAA, in turn, allows developers to directly prompt the user to enable access to cross-site storage in third-party content. It is similar to Apple’s Application Tracking Transparency framework but even more restricted. To allow access the following conditions must be fulfilled:
These conditions degrade the UX, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of users won’t give their approval.
RWS relaxes these conditions for a limited list of websites registered in the canonical set.
So, at the end of 2023, Postindustria and MOW connected the efforts to check how exactly the RWS works in practice and whether it is straightforward to submit your sites.
We recommend you read the article with screencasts and video demos for the details. Moreover, you can try the work in your browser since the sites are publicly available (see the article for the domains). So don’t be shy and try it on! But in short, we can summarize the following:
So, even though the RWS looks like an option for cross-site data sharing, it is hardly usable for big players, at least for now.
The Privacy Sandbox is definitely the game changer in the industry. It is new, it is big, it has a bunch of gaps. But most probably, it is the toolset that everyone in the industry will face, and very soon. We at Postindustria are studying the framework’s pros and cons, integration scenarios, and use cases. We are always happy to connect to help, learn, and grow together.
