Commentary

Google Has Until 2028 To Satisfy A Competition And Markets Authority Commitment: Report

The lack of federal privacy laws has left advertisers struggling to keep up with individual state laws, as Google and Microsoft continue to work on developing technology that works.  

Earlier this year, JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, founder and CEO of Alliant, a data-as-a-service company that combines first- and third-party data to create second-party data, told Data & Programmatic Insider she would like to see a federal privacy law and not rely on each state to have their own.

Heather Federman, vice president of privacy and policy at BigID, cited two main challenges to overcome in getting a federal privacy law in 2020 -- “whether or not there’s some form of a private rate of action, and whether or not there’s federal preemption.” She said, “if somehow these two are negotiated, the U.S. might live in a world with federal privacy regulation.”

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Federal or state regulated, consumer concerns about data privacy and pressure from regulators worldwide have left Google with no choice but to discontinue third-party cookie use in Chrome, Vice President of Global Ads Dan Taylor told attendees at an AdExchanger event earlier this week.

Regulators are not convinced that the alternatives Google has proposed to third-party cookies will work, so the company’s developers continue to work to find the correct solution.

Taylor said that Google has made commitments to the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK that are being applied globally.

“We’re not going to roll out a change to third-party cookies until we have some robust solutions in place for the ecosystem,” Taylor said. “This is an innovation problem that we haven’t solved yet.”

Google’s CMA commitment gives the company until 2028 to satisfy concerns about the Privacy Sandbox and its cookie phaseout.

Preparedness by marketers is a concern, but the real issues reside with promises made to the Competition and Markets Authority.

RTB House, Criteo and Google are the companies testing FLEDGE, (First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment), a cookieless remarketing tool that serves ads to custom audiences. It’s part of Sandbox, a proposal for remarketing and audiences. There are a few reported reasons why the technology continues to have challenges.

  • FLEDGE only handles the retargeting portion of performance advertising
  • Lack of proper reach and frequency controls
  • Current specifications state one data gatekeeper, Google

Slight variations in state-by-state laws in the United States also is causing concerns. While the European Union’s GDPR data privacy law is sweeping and consistent, the U.S. must grapple with variations from California to Colorado to Connecticut to Utah and Virginia — more on the way.

Taylor also expressed concerns about “pockmarking of state-level privacy regulations, not necessarily because of the concepts behind the regulation, but because it’s becoming incredibly difficult to manage slightly variant privacy regulations.”

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