Google has been trying to replace web browser tracking cookies with a new ‘Privacy Sandbox’ since 2019. The company is now reworking that plan again and has decided not to kill browser cookies (for now).
Google announced that it is reworking its Privacy Sandbox proposal with a “an updated approach that elevates user choice.” Instead of removing support for third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser, which are used primarily to track user activity across websites for targeted advertising, third-party cookies will apparently remain an option as a user setting.
A new blog post explains, “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.”
Google has been building Privacy Sandbox as a new framework for advertising and cross-site communication since 2019. A core component of the initial proposal, the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC for short), was widely panned by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other web browser vendors over privacy concerns. Google started reworking it in 2022, replacing FLoC with the Topics API, which was at least marginally more safe for users and still safer than third-party cookies.
The plan all along has been to kill third-party tracking cookies in Chrome—which would also affect Edge, Vivaldi, and other Chromium based browsers—once the Privacy Sandbox was fully ready to replace all of the use cases for tracking cookies. That process was supposed to start in the first quarter of 2024, and be fully complete by the end of the year, but Google paused the rollout in response to complaints from the web advertising industry and the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The blog post is light on actual details, but reading between the lines, it seems like Privacy Sandbox might not have a real future. Google said, “We’ll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.” The phrase “continue to make […] available” sounds like there probably won’t be much future development, other than ensuring everything that was already implemented will remain functional. We’ll have to wait and see, though.
Google has been building Privacy Sandbox for nearly five years now, with dozens of APIs spanning across the Chrome web browser and Android devices. It’s supposed to be a compromise between what users want and what advertisers and publishers want, but that just means everyone is equally unhappy. Privacy Sandbox still analyzes user behavior to target advertisements, which is not private, but it’s still less personal data than third-party cookies can theoretically collect, which makes ads targeted with Privacy Sandbox less valuable for publishers. Google’s solution, at least for now, is to not change anything.
Source: Google
