Recently Adform announced support for the first publicly available Privacy Sandbox API designed to limit covert tracking and fingerprinting: User-Agent Client Hints (UA-CH). Driving responsible advertising is critical to building long-term solutions for the industry and we see this as an important part of that equation. In support of this goal, Adform is committed to driving cutting edge advertising solutions while ensuring the highest standards of data protection and consumers privacy. We see this first operational outcome of the Privacy Sandbox as a positive tool alongside a multi-faceted approach. User-Agent Client Hints enables a more privacy-friendly internet while still supporting important advertising use cases like fraud prevention and device targeting. By adopting a wide range of different technologies, the industry will be able to achieve the goal of providing solutions to meet advertisers' needs in a privacy and consent-oriented fashion.

The User-Agent string is a piece of information that web browsers send to publishers that contains information about the specific browser and device accessing their website. Publishers can use this information to adapt their website's content and behavior to the user. The User-Agent Client Hints (UA-CH) in Chrome reduces the level of detail that's being passed about a user's device model, browser, and operating system. By doing so, it aims to limit  the information that is shared that could be used for fingerprinting and device tracking. With UA-CH, the information that is needed must be explicitly requested and the browser decides on the information that is getting shared.

To support Chrome’s Client Hints, we have worked closely with our long-time device classification partner 51Degrees who have developed a tool to help OpenRTB implementers perform specification-compliant conversions. Read more on their blog post here. With their support we have updated to the latest version of our device classification database, further improving data quality. 

For Publishers, this change requires an update to their properties to pass the new Client Hints via their SSP partners to platforms like Adform. Since enabling support for Client Hints, we have already seen the adoption of Client Hints by five major SSPs including Adform.  

We encourage our trusted publisher partners and website owners to add support for Client Hints headers as soon as possible. Chrome is now in the final phase of the roll-out and is planned to be completed this month. For more information on User-Agent Reduction and User-Agent Client Hints, please visit www.privacysandbox.com. We also have a user guide available for our clients in Adform Help that can be found HERE. 

The project from 51Degrees is available on GitHub and as a demo page.