Google announced an important milestone for Privacy Sandbox for the web: reached the “general availability” in Chrome for APIs ad relevance and measurement. This milestone is a significant step towards a more private web.
Google Privacy Sandbox: the work done so far
The company introduced the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019 to improve privacy across the web (and Android) while continuing to provide businesses with the tools they need to succeed today. Since then, it has worked with many different stakeholders, including publishers, developers, ad tech providers, consumers and more, to design and develop new solutions that allow us to achieve this objective.
He then adopted this approach because we believe it is fundamental improve privacy at the same time preserve access to information, whether it’s news, step-by-step guides explaining how to do an activity, or funny videos. Without privacy-focused and sustainable third-party cookie alternatives, like Privacy Sandbox, it risks reducing access to information for all people and incentivizing invasive tactics like browser fingerprinting.
The general availability of the Privacy Sandbox APIs allows ad tech vendors and developers to test these new technologies at scale in their products and services, as they are now available to most Chrome users.
Google Privacy Sandbox: new controls for Chrome users
Google also launched new privacy controls for ads in Chrome, which allow people to manage how Privacy Sandbox technologies can be used to show them ads. These controls allow users to customize their experience by choosing the ad topics they are interested in, the relevance and measurement APIs they want to enable and more.
Solution integration and effectiveness testing
General availability means that Privacy Sandbox technologies are ESTABLISH and ready to be tested on a large scale by advertising solutions to support key use cases for advertisers and publishers. Google has reached this stage after receiving extensive industry feedback, so it has no plans to implement significant changes to its API interfaces before it phases out third-party cookies.
The companies Who integrate Privacy Sandbox APIs into their solutions can now deploy and test them at scale to gauge their readiness for the elimination of third-party cookies in Chrome scheduled for release second half of 2024. These evaluations may include experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of Privacy Sandbox, in accordance with the Commitments and in collaboration with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the United Kingdom, and specific test groups facilitated by Chrome.
Goodbye to third-party cookies
Starting in the fourth quarter of 2023, Google will support the industry’s testing efforts with the ability to simulate withdrawal of third-party cookies with a percentage of its users. Then, in the first quarter of 2024, we will disable third-party cookies for 1% of all Chrome users, creating the environments needed to test the effectiveness of the Privacy Sandbox API.