Google brings new ad ID system to Android

Google will begin the beta rollout of its post-cookie Privacy Sandbox on Android, the mobile operating system behind 70% of mobile devices worldwide.

To be delivered next year, the plan is to give developers and practitioners time to test it. Privacy Sandbox was tested globally on the Chrome browser back in April.

Fear of another ATT

The rollout follows the curtailing of Apple's cross-app audience tracking through its ATT feature. The change hit a lot of advertising-funded businesses hard, and has caused Meta some particularly big problems. Some feared that Google would take a similarly hard-line approach.

While its changes are significant, it appears to be moving at a more measured pace and allows developers to test and refine before the system goes live. When it announced the news, Android released a short but detailed video for developers with use cases of incoming technologies. 

What’s the Privacy Sandbox, again?

It’s the network of systems that Google will deploy to target and measure advertising once its browsers and devices stop supporting cookies – and with the Android news, mobile ad identifiers.

The aim is to limit sharing user data in a way that protects user privacy, while building a new set of protocols that can sustain the advertising business that fuels both Google and many other apps and services.

How it works for mobile

On Android, it plans to do this through four key technologies; the first three are standard across the Sandbox and the last is specifically for Android:

• Topics API: this allows developers to infer topics of interest based on the apps on a user’s device
• FLEDGE API: an ad-tech tool for remarketing and building custom audiences that blocks cross-site tracking.
• Attribution Reporting: to support measurement.
• SDK Runtime: this creates a framework – or “environment” – in which safeguarded user data can be run alongside third-party tech and should maintain the performance of mobile apps while enhancing user privacy. Digiday has a more detailed description.

Deadline still unknown

It’s important to note that it hasn’t yet committed to a deadline for retiring mobile IDs, but change is coming in “at least two years”, Google said back in February. Cookies, meanwhile, are due to be phased out by 2024, though this deadline has shifted multiple times.

Its plans have been in the works for a while and have undergone several major changes, as well as a process of allaying regulators’ competition concerns that have legally bound the company to collaborate and share testing results with the industry.

On the user side

The news comes the same week Google rolls out changes to search and maps that it announced back in September. These are set to make the search experience more visual and to enable discovery.

Sourced from Google, Statcounter, Bloomberg, WARC, Digiday, AdExchanger, TechCrunch