In the W3C, the Post-Cookie Conversation Finds Consensus

Discrepancies in attribution frameworks

The W3C’s PATCG has been focused specifically on the attribution use case of advertising, or matching a customer action to the ad that potentially caused it—a piece of digital advertising that marketers have become reliant on.

One of the major differences to resolve is that the Meta/Mozilla and Apple proposals would break up users’ information and store it in multiple places via a process called multiparty computing. Google’s proposal relies on a trusted server, said Nick Doty, senior technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

But the W3C is only focused on the attribution use case, Doty said, adding, “[For] targeting proposals, I haven’t seen as much community consensus.”

For a while, the W3C was reluctant to enter the privacy-centric advertising conversation, said Aram Zucker-Scharff, engineering lead for privacy and security compliance for The Washington Post and co-chair of the PATCG. He said it took until Google Chrome announced that it was deprecating third-party cookies before ad-tech companies were willing to reevaluate measurement solutions they were invested in. Safari and Firefox deprecated third-party cookies in 2017 and 2019, respectively.

The authority of the W3C

There is still reluctance. Most conversations have been happening in the PATCG, and eventually, there would need to be a working group on private advertising for the organization to make any formal standard about advertising on the web.

However, the W3C hasn’t decided yet whether this working group should exist.

“[There are] people who don’t think this consortium should take on this work,” Doty said.

Plus, the W3C is not a government organization. Much of the fate of private advertising solutions is in the hands of the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, which is monitoring Google Chrome’s cookie deprecation process and assessing its Privacy Sandbox proposals. The CMA has the power to stop Google’s plans if the regulatory body feels that they give Google an unfair market advantage.

“The W3C doesn’t have law enforcement,” Zucker-Scharff said. “There isn’t anything that will force browsers to use anything.”