Google just killed Privacy Sandbox: How will this affect you?

Google relies heavily on online advertising, and the company has previously been criticized for the amount of data it sucked up from users in the name of targeted advertising. However, the search giant introduced the Privacy Sandbox back in 2019 in a bid to deliver a more private approach to advertising on the web. Unfortunately, Google has now announced the end of Privacy Sandbox.

Google told AdWeek that the entire Privacy Sandbox initiative was being dropped. This confirmation comes after the company published a blog post revealing that 10 related technologies were being retired due to low adoption. The post noted that Chrome and Android would be affected by this decision. Google’s post also added that a few Privacy Sandbox technologies that have seen broad adoption would be retained.

We will be continuing our work to improve privacy across Chrome, Android and the web, but moving away from the Privacy Sandbox branding,” a spokesperson was quoted as saying. “We’re grateful to everyone who contributed to this initiative, and will continue to collaborate with the industry to develop and advance platform technologies that help support a healthy and thriving web.”

Google launched Privacy Sandbox in 2019, with the expected aim of replacing third-party cookies. However, the decision to kill the project comes over a year after the search giant announced that it wouldn’t drop third-party cookies after all.

Privacy Sandbox also manifested in a few notable ad-related toggles in Chrome, namely ad topics, site-suggested ads, and ad measurement. Site-suggested ads, for one, let you choose whether websites and their ad partners could use your web activity to personalize ads. The ad topics toggle lets you decide whether Chrome can share broad advertising topics, gleaned from your browsing data, with websites. It sounds like these toggles might be affected by this news. For one, Google’s blog post mentions that the Topics API, ostensibly used for the ad topics feature, would be killed off.

The Privacy Sandbox project also expanded to Android in 2022, but Google noted at the time that it needed help from the industry and users in figuring out how this entire project would work. Evidently, it seems like Google has given up on trying to make this specific approach work. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously claimed that the Privacy Sandbox name was “deceiving” and that tracking was just taking place via one company instead of many entities. So we’re keen to see how Google’s follow-up projects differ from this retired initiative.