“The concept of adding a key-value server could make it easier for ad tech companies to make the transition from interest-group targeting that relies on third-party cookies to TURTLEDOVE-like flow by enabling components of ad selection to remain server-side,” said Chetna Bindra, Google’s senior product manager for user trust, privacy and transparency. Rather than an acknowledgment that the browser isn’t the end-all-be-all user agent, Dovekey is an attempt to create technology that would make TURTLEDOVE more capable of functioning in the real world.ĭaily News Roundup Blue-Chip Or Green-Chip Agency Accounts Google’s Epic Mistake As Dovekey’s authors put it on GitHub, it’s “the benefit of SPARROW bidding even if the gatekeeper server just acts as a simple lookup table.” SPARROW’s answer was to place control over bidstream data and auction logic with an independent, trusted third-party server or “gatekeeper.”ĭovekey aims to simplify the bidding and auction-related aspects of TURTLEDOVE by introducing the gatekeeper concept from SPARROW.

TURTLEDOVE suggested moving the ad auction into the browser, which many criticized as too big of an engineering challenge and a power play on Google’s part. Dovekey is a modification of SPARROW, a proposal developed by Criteo in response to Google’s TURTLEDOVE proposal. Google first hinted in August that it would be open to entertaining parts of SPARROW.

It’s probably worth a quick refresher on how we got here.

Sandbox at powerplay