Limited seats remain

Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25

REGISTER

WTF are private state tokens in Google’s Privacy Sandbox?

This article is part of a special Digiday editorial series to catch you up on the basics of Google’s phaseout of third-party cookies. More from the series →

The third-party cookie’s deprecation — and broader crackdown on cross-site tracking practices, such as device fingerprinting — comes with side effects. One side effect is losing the means for companies to combat bot traffic. To account for this consequence, Google’s Privacy Sandbox features a proposal for fighting fraudulent traffic called Private State Tokens.

Private State Tokens effectively have sites that are able to authenticate site visitors be the ones to vouch for those visitors’ authenticity so that they can be trusted by other sites. As broken down in this explainer video, it’s akin to a friend recommending a therapist to another friend — albeit with the web browser providing a privacy-preserving means for passing on that recommendation.

More in Marketing

‘The conversation has shifted’: The CFO moved upstream. Now agencies have to as well

One interesting side effect of marketing coming under greater scrutiny in the boardroom: CFOs are working more closely with agencies than ever before.

Why one brand reimbursed $10,000 to customers who paid its ‘Trump Tariff Surcharge’ last year

Sexual wellness company Dame is one of the first brands to proactively return money tied to President Donald Trump’s now-invalidated tariffs.

WTF is Meta’s Manus tool?

Meta added a new agentic AI tool to its Ads Manager in February. Buyers have been cautiously probing its potential use cases.