Summary
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Indirectly, Google announced the end of Privacy Sandbox, a project created to reduce the use of third-party cookies and increase privacy on the web;
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The initiative faced resistance from the advertising sector and regulatory questions in the US and UK, for example;
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Although discontinued, Sandbox contributed technologies like CHIPS, which makes cross-site tracking more difficult.
Without fanfare and indirectly, Google announced the end of Privacy Sandbox, a project that aimed to increase users’ privacy on the web, mainly in the context of digital advertising. The reason for the discontinuation of the initiative? Low adherence, according to the company.
The Privacy Sandbox was announced by Google in 2019 as a set of technologies and practices focused, above all, on reducing or even eliminating so-called third-party cookies in Chrome and, eventually, in other browsers.
What’s wrong with this feature? Cookies are small files that contain navigation data, such as preferences or login information used to recognize you when you access that website in the future. Third-party cookies, in turn, are those that were not generated by the website you are accessing, but by external services linked to it.
In digital advertising, third-party cookies are used, for example, to track the websites accessed by the user (cross-site tracking), so that it is possible to understand their browsing habits and offer contextualized advertisements to them.
Given the abusive use that was being made (and still is) of third-party cookies, Privacy Sandbox was created with the aim of replacing this feature in browsers as much as possible.
However, the project encountered several obstacles along the way. To begin with, Google had difficulty convincing the digital advertising industry of the project’s viability.
One of Google’s proposals was to replace cookies with a mechanism that sends targeted ads to users on Chrome, but restricts cross-site tracking. Advertising companies feared this approach would negatively impact ad revenue, however.
But the biggest difficulty was regulatory: authorities in the United States and the United Kingdom, for example, were suspicious that the Privacy Sandbox could be used to make Google even more dominant in the online advertising market, which would mainly harm small competitors.
In 2024, Google dropped the idea of ending third-party cookies, but kept the Privacy Sandbox. Until now.
Why was Privacy Sandbox discontinued?
In the official statement, Anthony Chavez, project leader, explains that several Privacy Sandbox technologies have been discontinued “considering their low levels of adoption”.
The text does not talk about the end of the Privacy Sandbox itself, but, at the same time, AdWeekGoogle confirmed that the list of discontinued technologies means that the project as a whole has been terminated.
The initiative is not considered a total failure because, from there, contributions came to technologies that reached some level of relevance, such as the Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS), which allows websites to store cookies for each address visited by the user separately, making tracking difficult.
But from a broad perspective, the end of the Privacy Sandbox is a reminder that there is still a lot of work to be done towards a truly digital privacy-friendly online environment.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/e-o-fim-do-privacy-sandbox-projeto-de-privacidade-online-do-google/
