Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the initiative kicked off in 2019 with the aim of developing innovative privacy-protecting technologies to replace third-party cookies on the web, is officially dead.
After a blog post today detailed 10 remaining Privacy Sandbox technologies being axed, a Google spokesperson confirmed to ADWEEK that the entire project is being retired.
“We will be continuing our work to improve privacy across Chrome, Android and the web, but moving away from the Privacy Sandbox branding,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
The Privacy Sandbox tools being eliminated include
- Attribution Reporting API for both Chrome and Android
- IP Protection
- On-Device Personalization
- Private Aggregation
- Protected Audience API for Chrome and Android
- Protected App Signals
- Related Website Sets
- SelectURL
- SDK Runtime
- Topics for Chrome and Android, Google’s experiment in interest-based rather than identity-based advertising
The decision to slash the tech was made after “evaluating ecosystem feedback” and observing “low levels of adoption,” Anthony Chavez, the vice president of Privacy Sandbox, said in a blog post.
The news comes just six months after Google officially abandoned its long-promised plans to wipe third-party cookies from Chrome in an effort to better protect user privacy. After pushing back its deadline for cookie deprecation multiple times between 2020 and 2024, Google eventually pivoted and said it would keep cookies but roll out a new opt-in experience for users.
This plan, however, was dissolved in April of this year, when Google announced it would ditch the consent method and go back to where it all started—maintaining its “current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome.”
Considering this pattern, Google’s decision to slice up what’s left of the Privacy Sandbox will not come as a surprise to many.
Google will maintain a small number of tools developed in the Sandbox that have achieved significant adoption, including Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS), which enables websites to store cookies separately for each site a user visits, so the same third-party service can’t track the user across different properties.
The company will also maintain support for the Federated Credential Management API (FedCM), which lets users sign in to websites with existing accounts—such as Google or Facebook—while limiting the personal data shared and preventing those providers from tracking activity across different sites.
Google will also keep Private State Tokens, a tracking-free authentication tool designed to mitigate fraud online.
