 Hello, everyone. I'm Selina Connell, the managing director of news partnerships EMEA at Google. We know the industry is thinking hard about what's to come in a world without third-party cookies. And as you may know, Google, led by the Chrome and Android teams, is working hard on the Privacy Sandbox Initiative, developing new solutions that support ecosystem needs, without reliance on online tracking identifiers so that publishers grow their business in a privacy-preserving way. Given our efforts to partner with the publisher ecosystem in adopting change, we wanted to take this opportunity to hear firsthand from the Privacy Sandbox team about the path to cookie deprecation in 2024. Today, you'll hear about a number of new tools and techniques that can be adopted to have immediate impact for your business in a privacy-centric web. But first, let's start with some context. Billions of people around the world rely on access to information on sites and apps. To provide this resource for free, without relying on tracking, publishers and developers need privacy-enhancing alternatives for their key business needs, including serving relevant content and ads. A 2022 global research study showed that 80% of users are concerned about their online privacy. It's clear more than ever. People expect companies to respect how their data is used and to keep their information private. 85% want brands to invest in more privacy-focused technologies. The tide is turning, and it's important to remember how these issues are viewed both by consumers and by regulators. In the last few years, consumer consciousness about privacy has reached its tipping point. Consumers fear sharing data, and they're turning to platforms that promise rate of privacy. Meanwhile, regulators globally are weighing into these concerns. And the question for our industry is how do we transition into a sustainable, durable, privacy future? The increased priority on privacy and limiting user data sharing is not a temporary fad. It represents a fundamental shift in how people in society expect online experiences to protect their privacy. And it's clear the current system of online advertising, which was built on legacy technology developed decades ago, like third-party cookies, is now falling short of users' expectations. And it's an imperative that, as an industry, we respond to this by developing durable products with privacy at their core, powered by innovative technology that enables businesses to succeed online. So let me introduce you to Hannah, to Mr. Inch, and the Privacy Sandbox team to help demystify the Privacy Sandbox and how it's going to support both users and publishers in the journey towards a more private internet. Hi, I'm Hannah Dormester-Inch, Director of Privacy Partnerships for EMEA here at Google. I'm excited to share with you a refresher on the Privacy Sandbox journey and outlook and our timeline for third-party cookie deprecation in Pro. As Selena noted, there is a fundamental shift in how people expect online experiences to protect their privacy. The Privacy Sandbox initiative reflects this change, addressing two core challenges. First, developing innovative alternatives to key use cases that today rely on third-party cookies and cross-site identifiers. These legacy technologies embedded in your browser track your activity across the web. Second of all, we are combating harmful practices like covert tracking as these tactics undermine user privacy on the open internet. So we aim to develop, in a collaborative manner, new privacy forward technologies to reduce cross-site and cross-app tracking while ensuring that businesses have the tools and insights they need to succeed. For nearly 30 years, the digital advertising industry has relied on legacy technologies like third-party cookies. These outdated methods fail to meet modern privacy expectations, leading other browsers to block them by default. We believe that making brute force decisions or providing blunt instruments without having alternatives in place is not the right way to move forward because restricting user identifiers without alternatives may lead to rise in covert tracking methods like fingerprinting, which could further undermine user privacy. Since 2019, we have worked with the industry to develop better privacy-observing solutions, both web and mobile platforms. We also believe that privacy and performance can and must coexist. And we believe that consumer platforms, meaning also browsers and operating systems, have a responsibility to support the transition to a more private internet. That is why we are developing the Private Sandbox and launching these technologies in Chrome and Android. The mission of the Private Sandbox is to keep people's activity private across a free and open internet. But it's important to understand that Private Sandbox is not a simple swap of legacy technologies into a slightly better version. It is really a fundamental rethink and rebuild towards a new privacy-forward future. We have developed new platform technologies that address a wide range of important ecosystem use cases that today typically rely on cross-site identifiers like third-party cookies. This includes new technologies for digital advertising that support ad relevance and measurement. And these technologies are now available for 100% of Chrome users worldwide. In a few moments, you will hear more about the privacy design elements, but it's important to note that Private Sandbox aims are broader than just advertising use cases. I also want to take a moment to share four key facts about what the Private Sandbox is and what it is. First of all, Private Sandbox works the same for everyone. All businesses and ad tech platforms, including Google Ads, have the same access to data and capabilities at the same time. This is one of the key commitments which we have made to the UK's competition and markets authority, which we apply globally. Second of all, it is not a standalone ad tech solution for marketers and publishers. We often hear Private Sandbox being described as a one-to-one replacement for third-party cookies. I want to be clear that is not the case. The Private Sandbox instead provides building blocks that ad tech providers can incorporate into their products alongside other privacy-safe signals like contextual and first-party data. And just like today, ad tech companies will craft a wide range of innovative solutions using the best of these technologies to meet the needs of their customers. And thirdly, Private Sandbox is not another type of tracking. It significantly improves privacy compared to third-party cookies and other cross-site identifiers. And it does so by using privacy-enhancing technologies or pets for short. And finally, at its core, Private Sandbox is a collaborative effort. Companies from across the industry have provided input which has directly shaped how these new solutions work. Making industry-impacting changes, whether introducing new technologies or phasing out existing ones, is something that needs to be done in the open. And that is why we discuss and debate our proposals and technologies in forums like the W3C in industry bodies and trade associations. And we are already seeing new solutions being built by ad tech companies. These companies are reimagining their solutions with the help of Private Sandbox technologies. These are solutions that help advertisers reach and measure their target audiences or help publishers monetize their content all whilst protecting their data. It is thanks to the effort of hundreds of companies like these who have contributed to the proposals and discussions and to the dozens who have leaned into testing that the Private Sandbox is ready for the industry to adopt now. Since the beginning of the initiative, the focus has been really on ad tech, transforming audience targeting, auction mechanics and measurement. But as we move from functional testing and begin utility testing, publishers are absolutely key. We are now making sure that, first of all, agencies and advertisers are spending on privacy-preserving solutions. Second of all, that ad tech continue to reimagine their services with privacy-preserving signals. And of course, that publishers open up inventory to validate real-life integrations and enable end-to-end testing. The stakes are high. If we fail to take decisive action, we risk reducing access to information for all users on the internet. I'm gratified that many companies are rallying to tackle this challenge. To summarise, here are the most relevant updates until the full deprecation of third-party cookies in growth. In the summer of 2023, the private sandbox technologies were made available to 100% of Chrome browsers worldwide. And in January 2024, Chrome disabled cookies for 1% of Chrome browsers globally and has made available consistent labels to facilitate testing across stakeholders. Until July of 2024, the ecosystem is testing the private sandbox technologies and sharing their respective results with the CMA. No sooner than July the 1st, CMA will start a 60 to 120-day evaluation period called a standstill. Subsequently, subject to the approval of the CMA, Chrome plans to fully sunset third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024. So the final question I want to address is this. What happens to the private sandbox after third-party cookie deprecation? Is this it or will it continue to evolve? I want to be clear, we are not going anywhere. The private sandbox isn't just about deprecating third-party cookies. It is an ongoing initiative to ensure that the web and mobile evolve in ways that strengthen user protection and support a free and open internet. So we're going to keep working with all of you to raise the bar both on privacy and utility in the years to come. And speaking of working together, let me hand over to Juan to talk about some of the tools and insights and high-level steps you can take to get ready as we count down to the third-party cookie phase out in Chrome. Hi, I'm Juan from the Privacy Sandbox team. Thank you, Hane and Zulina. In this section, I'll be covering freaky topics. Firstly, I will briefly introduce the privacy enhancing technologies that enable privacy sandbox. Then I will cover new technologies that address advertising use cases on preserved trust and usability for a private web. And finally, I will take you through the high-level steps that you and your teams can take right now as we count down to the third-party cookie phase out if the CMA agrees during the stencil period of the second half of the year. So let's jump in. So hopefully we're hoping to demystify a few questions you might have had at the beginning of this session. So now let's take a closer look at how Privacy Sandbox works. Privacy enhancing technologies are fundamental to this initiative. You might remember Hane speaking about the context of the evolving privacy landscape, including innovation as a key driver. Privacy, private enhancing technologies, or Pets, demonstrate how innovation can be applied in a new and exciting way to help solve privacy use cases and potentially to help to uncover new opportunities for a more private web. For example, we have spoken about the cookie challenge where in a more private, privacy-centric web, we seek to limit the ability to re-identify a user across different sites. There is a technique called differential privacy which hides the original data by adding a statistical noise to the data sets to maintain both privacy and accuracy. We're also delivering improved user settings and controls so people can make more meaningful choices of other data usage via the new Privacy Sandbox technologies. Most of the Privacy Sandbox APIs employ multiple pets in combination to protect and minimize the collection of the user data. As you've heard from Hane, the Privacy Sandbox consists of another 20 APIs that address a broad range of new ecosystem use cases that today rely on cross-site identifiers like free body cookies. All of these APIs are designed with privacy at a core and utilize the latest in privacy-enhancing technologies to protect user data. You might be interested to know that this includes the use of technologies like data aggregation, differential privacy, data noisy on-device processing or trusted execution environments, a few of the pets that I mentioned previously. Because of the design, Privacy Sandbox does not rely on cross-site user identifiers and limits sharing of a user data which is a big step forward for user privacy. So let's dive a little bit deeper into a few of these new technologies. When we think about the new advertising technologies, think of it as technologies that support relevant use cases and technologies that support measurement use cases. And because of the privacy enhancing technologies, we enable these advertising use cases without user identifiers. So what I mean by this, the topics API is designed to preserve privacy while showing relevant content and ads. It provides a high level signal of a user interest base on very recent browsing history to help sites and apps to serve relevant ads. On a high level, there are three main parts of topics. First, the API labels each website from a set of recognizable high level topics. For example, the browser will match as per website with the topic sports. Then the browser collects all the topics a user has visited and prioritized them based on commercial value and frequency for a given week. And finally, a total of three topics for three weeks are shared with the topics API callers to help advertisers show users more relevant ads without needing to know the specific sites they have visited. Users also have the option to view the topics they're associated with according to their browsing history and remove them, any they want, or disable the API entirely. As we move down the funnel, performance will come to play an important role in delivering on business goals. The Protected Audience API, formerly known as FLECH, is a privacy sandbox proposal to serve question audiences and enable remarketing use cases designed so third parties cannot track user browsing behavior across sites. Today, if you visit that website, the third party cookies can be used to show your relevant ads later on, but a lot of your browsing history is exposed and too much of your information can be collected and shared with third parties. With Protected Audiences, advertising technologies companies can show the user ads but information about their user browsing history stays private. The Attribution Reporting API helps advertisers to measure performance of their online ads without needing to track people's activity across the websites and the apps. Imagine your browsing the morning news and you see a pair of headphones that are on sale. You click on that ad to take a closer look and that tech company can use Attribution Reporting to let an advertiser know that approaches occur but keeps your individual browsing or app history private using methods like encryption, time delays, secure service, data aggregation, and randomification. The advertiser can see which of their ads was most effective without individual identifiers being used in the process. This is great. For those interested in understanding how the relevance and measurement APIs work in a more detailed and technical way, stay tuned for our next section. Yeetal Advertising is key to maintain the free and open web we all know today. And beyond advertising purposes, developers currently use their barricades to provide a great amount of web experiences but cookies and some of their signals were not designed with privacy in mind, allowing companies to track users across sites and thus the strength of cross-site boundaries to meet users' privacy expectations. At the same time, we need to ensure that we're enabling the legitimate use of web experiences to continue guarantee that we're building new technologies that will limit cover tracking across mobile and web. So what does it involve? We discussed from the onset that Privacy Sandbox is focused on rising bar for user privacy. And this is why we're also seeking to strengthen cross-site privacy boundaries and prevent cover tracking by designing several non-advertisement APIs that can be used beyond advertisement and use cases. Let's discuss some of the available APIs that are relevant to publishers, especially CHIPS related website sets and user-agent client hints. CHIPS API helps you to continue using third-party embeds that rely on third-party cookies by partitioning the use of third-party cookies to the site they are placing. Any data flows remain restricted to that partition. And if your embeds are used on yet another site, that pairing will also be partitioned and no info can be shared across these partitions. Related website sets, if you or your organization owns and runs multiple sites, you can combine them in sets within which cross-site cookies are treated as first-party and can be enabling data flows between your sites and your related website sets. User-agent client hints API. Since the use of the reduced user agents in Chrome 13.113, the user-agent client hints API has allowed callers to retrieve additional information about their usage agent in a privacy-preserving format. And finally, let me talk about the federated credential management, which is a technology for a privacy-preserving approach to federate identity services, where users can login into sites without sharing their personal information with the identity service or the site. These were just a few examples of helpful tools that you can add to your toolkit to assist with more privacy-centric digital experiences. The important thing to remember here is that these are not replacing third-party cookies. They are a new generation of web technologies to take us from a new level of functionality while safeguarding user privacy. We encourage you to test, learn, and share your feedback so we can help privacy products with more insights from the publisher community. But let's take a moment to come back to the user perspective. It is important to consider the user controls as part of the overall digital consumer experience. We have also rolled out a new ad privacy control syndrome that allows people to manage how the privacy sandbox technology can be used to deliver ads they see. These controls allows users to tailor their experience by customizing what ad topics they are interested in, which sites can create relevance and not share many APIs they want, and they can enable and disable and more. We can view these controls by visiting settings, privacy and security, ad privacy control syndrome, and you can find additional information about the new ad's privacy features in our Help Center. Okay, so let's talk about readiness. So what steps can publishers take now, next or later to prepare for the third-party verification? My peer Damian will detail the specific actions you can take to maximize privacy sandbox for inventory and how you can increase your participation in testing. For now, here's an overview of the steps that we have taken in 2023 and the ones that you can take now in the future to prepare for third-party verification in Chrome. In 2023, it was time to learn and assess. Adtex worked with Chrome to test the functionality of a new privacy enhancing technologies. Most of the publishers were not able to test these technologies directly in live marketing campaigns. However, we encourage publishers like you to ask SSPs about their testing plans and discuss their individual needs, objectives, and use cases. We also ask publishers to closely monitor privacy sandbox updates throughout our regular blog posts and quarterly ecosystem updates and to share feedback throughout our numerous feedback channels and engagements. Lastly, we encourage publishers to voice their interests in participating in testing throughout the public github tester list for the ad's APIs. In terms of now, SSPs have started to enable testing of privacy sandbox technologies within their selling platforms. They are preparing and executing testing plans during the current Chrome-facilitated testing period. We encourage you to participate in their respective testing plans if offered the chance. Some of the SSPs might require publishers to update their setups to be more comfortable with their testing plan as such as we encourage publishers to leverage privacy sandbox technologies as much as possible for the inventory. Lastly, we recommend publishers to start auditing their third-party cookie dependencies across their domains to ensure the best web experiences possible for the users in the future. As for next, we anticipate the ecosystem will optimize and develop best practices based on the shared learnings as we continue to rise the bar for user privacy. To move away from third-party cookie-based solutions and to explore new approaches to support user privacy. If you want to be more involved, the privacy sandbox team has created a public github tester list to facilitate testing coordination between different website stakeholders. This is a great way to declare your interest in being considered for the future at tech testing or perhaps to showcase your learnings for the related websites or chips APIs where you have directly integrated these technologies. If this is of your interest to you or to your teams, you wish to review the github tester list for APIs such as topics, protected audiences and attribution reporting. In this list, you will be able to see what roles testers play as well as any planning time for testing thanks to testing plans, key learnings and contact and information. Thank you. Now I will be handing over to my peer, Scott, who will be chatting in more detail with our guest speaker to understand what other publishers are doing to prepare for the Google's world in Chrome. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Scott Friesen from the Privacy Partnerships team at Google. It's my great pleasure to introduce Terry Hornsby, EVP of Mattis and Group Digital and Innovation Director at Reach to share some insights about their journey on the Privacy Sandbox. So warm welcome to you, Terry. For the people who maybe don't know much about Reach, could you give us a bit of background and about the company? Yeah, sure. So Reach is the biggest commercial publisher in Europe. It's a regional and national newspaper and digital platform. Excellent. So in your role as EVP here at Reach, when you're sitting in the executive meetings, what were the kind of discussion points that you were thinking through as you were evaluating the Privacy Sandbox and what was your kind of role in that journey? Yeah, very much the team myself leading that conversation. I think the first initial thing is what does it mean? Looking at the calculus environments that we already have and looking at kind of the differences between the Sandbox and that and just identifying what we wanted to find out from the test and also the ongoing tests. Yeah, and I think we have seen today that there's a lot in there as part of the Privacy Sandbox. So maybe we can talk a little bit more about the use cases for the technology. So how did you identify and really prioritize which of the use cases you maybe wanted to test out and which ones maybe weren't as important or you were gonna wait on? Yeah, so I think the first initial step was what data comes back? So we run lots of tests around kind of what was coming back to us, identifying, again, topics, kind of the analysis of kind of buyers that are buying on Sandbox, et cetera. And then we kind of framed that, you know, kind of product roadmap, I guess, and tests where we looked at use cases across editorial engagement analytics and also test cases for advertising. So now the big question is how prepared is Reach to kind of maintain and sustain your user experience in this new cooculus world? What are you focusing on next? Yeah, so I think that's a big question. We've obviously got our own contextual proprietary tool, Mentis, and we're looking at different options around the data to come back from Sandbox. What does that mean? How do we match that with Mentis to be even in a stronger position? I'd suggest we're in a strong position because we've got our proprietary tech and also that tech is also available across other publishers. So I think we're in a strong position. I think what it means for us is that we've got time now to look at the different options, different use cases. I think also it gives us a good range to look across editorial engagement, content recommendations, what does it mean? What does the Sandbox give us data-wise compared to other data platforms? What does it tell us about our users? What does it tell us about the topics and contents they might be interested in and how we kind of needle and thread that into our everyday? Yeah, so from the sounds of it, you've got quite a big team that are looking at this. Can you also talk a little bit about what sort of structure you have internally to help kind of test and assess these different technologies? Was this sort of a small team that you just started out as a one-off, or is it part of a wider task force around privacy? Yeah, so we've got a commercial development team. We're lucky in the sense that it's quite a large commercial development team with the Department of Analytics people as well. It was set up originally kind of them as a project and saying, look, this is Sandbox, look at it again. Then I believe kind of the long term, medium term will be that the team grows as it is now when we incorporate it into our day to day. So yeah, we're lucky in the sense of we've got a large team looking after our day today in our BAU. And now it's just about how Sandbox fits into that BAU. But I think any size publisher, small, medium or large, you don't, to do that first step that everybody's worried about and don't necessarily think that people know how to really approach it is find out what data's coming back, do that test. That initially can be done by an analytics person that a dev or even a revops person. Yeah, it's great to share that learning as well as I think a lot of us here today are wondering what is that first step that we should be taking and how can we start preparing today? So, Terry, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you sharing your journey with us and helping to kind of inspire this group. So I will now hand it back to Damian who will provide us with a wrap of today's session. Thank you, Scott. Hello, everyone, my name is Damian and I will be sharing with you more detailed actionable steps you can take today in order to elevate your participation in the privacy Sandbox during the Chrome facilitated testing period. But before we go there, let me just remind you of where we are in terms of the roles towards our particular application in Chrome and which steps we have recommended publishers to take to prepare for the cookie-less future so far. Last summer, Chrome moves the privacy Sandbox to add the API to general availability, thus making them available in 100% of Chrome browsers and ultimately enabling large-scale testing with real traffic. To facilitate testing, Chrome will use two testing modes with consistent labels and different configurations. One of them being ModD in which short-party cookies are disabled on 1% of Chrome browsers globally which was released in the early 2024. Now, we are in the phase where AdTex and other ecosystem stakeholders are encouraged to test their integration. Until July, the ecosystem is free to test the privacy Sandbox technologies and share their respective results with the CMA. Starting July 1st, the CMA will start its evaluation period and trigger a standstill period. After this, Chrome will start to fully sunset third-party cookies on 100% of browsers subject to the approval of the CMA. As Juan mentioned before, in 2023, it was time to learn and assess. AdTex worked with Chrome to test the functionality of new privacy-enhancing technologies. We also asked publishers to closely monitor privacy Sandbox updates through a regular developer blog post and quarterly ecosystem updates and to share feedback through our numerous feedback channels and engagements. Lastly, we encourage publishers to voice their interest to participate in testing through the public GitHub tester list for the ads APIs. In terms of now, SSPs have started to enable testing of privacy Sandbox technologies. We encourage you to participate in their respective testing plan if offered a chance, in which, in some cases, we require publishers to update their setups. Lastly, we recommend publishers to start auditing their third-party cookie dependency across their domains to ensure the best web experience possible for their users in the future. As for next, we anticipate the ecosystem will optimize and develop best practices based on shared learnings. And we encourage you, publishers, to move away from third-party cookie-based solutions and to explore new approaches to support user privacy. But what are the actionable steps you can take today to be more involved in the privacy Sandbox initiative? Let's begin. First and foremost, it's important to understand the full picture when it comes to third-party cookie dependency. For this, we have created a Chrome extension that will analyze the presence of cookies on any given website and categorize them respectively. My colleague Andrei will share more details on the tool in the next session. But in a sense, you can use the extension with the Chrome developer tools and the privacy Sandbox tab to identify how each cookie was categorized and used. The privacy Sandbox tab also includes the different APIs you can use for example, limiting site boundaries, enhancing private advertising or partitioning cookies for your domain. The tab also includes the respective instructions to get you started. In addition, the list should also help you in identifying which cookies are crucial for your site and EW to create a pipeline of service providers you need to contact in regard to their cookie-less plans on Chrome. To have better visibility of companies participating in the testing of privacy Sandbox technologies, we recommend to check out the tester lists within GitHub for the ad APIs topics, protected audience, and attribution reporting. In this list, you can check the role each company has in the tests as well as a plan schedule, publish results, and a contact option. The list were created specifically to facilitate the coordination of testing between different parties of interest. If you want to leverage the privacy Sandbox signals as much as possible for your inventory, you may want to contact your SSPs to understand in more details their testing plans and step needs did to be included in testing. Previd is a good example of how you can obtain privacy Sandbox-enabled demand from different SSPs. However, some SSPs may require you to upgrade your Previd Core to version 8.9 or higher to enable topics and protected audience technologies for testing. Depending on the SSP, you may also need to update your bid adapter to be able to receive protected audience bids. Finally, it's necessary to add the protected audience module to be able to configure the different SSPs. With these updates, publishers enable the use of topics as well as remarketing an audience group through protected audience on their pages with Previd. As a publisher, you can also publicly voice your interest to be included in future tests by joining the tester lists in GitHub under the publisher repository. You can even showcase your learnings from APIs like related website sets or chips where you have directly integrated these technologies. Ultimately, these leads were created to facilitate testing between web stakeholders and to share learnings or early results with the ecosystem. So, once you enable the privacy Sandbox technologies as much as possible for your inventory, you might want to assess its impacts on your lead. Depending on your attack providers and if they're offering reporting capabilities in line with the privacy Sandbox APIs, you can link reports with the Chrome-facilitated testing levels. In Google Manager, for example, you can utilize reportable key values linked to Chrome labels to report an impression that included a topic or that were sold via protected audience section. For this, you will need to create predefined key values in line with the Chrome testing levels like Control-2 or Treatment-1-1 and make sure to apply them on a page level depending on the response you get when accessing the label. This ultimately will also give you the opportunity to create a testing framework that you can use to assess the privacy Sandbox technologies and share the respective results with the CMA to elevate the publisher's POV during the evaluation period. In summary, these are the steps you can take today to prepare as much as possible for the third-party cookie phase-out in Chrome. First, audit your third-party cookie usage by leveraging the privacy Sandbox Chrome extension and developer tools. Second, reach out to your providers to understand the cookie-less plan. Third, open up inventory for your providers to test by updating your pre-built modules and build adapters. Fourth, voice your interest for testing in the GitHub testing list and or showcase your findings. Fifth, update your reporting capabilities to assess the impact of the privacy Sandbox for inventory. Check out the checklist on the right with more detailed steps as you prepare for the phase-out for third-party cookies in Chrome.