Google Shuts Down Its Privacy Sandbox Project After Six Years of Development
Credit: Google
Google is ending its Privacy Sandbox initiative, launched in 2019 to create technologies that enhance user privacy and provide tools for digital businesses. The company confirmed the closure by publishing a list of ten technologies that will be decommissioned.
Work to improve privacy in Chrome, Android, and the web will continue, but the Privacy Sandbox brand will be retired. He also added that Google is grateful to everyone who contributed to this initiative and intends to collaborate with the industry to develop technologies that support a “healthy and thriving web environment.”
The list of discontinued developments includes the Attribution Reporting API for 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, and Topics for Chrome and Android, which was an experiment in interest-based advertising rather than user identification. Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, explained in a blog post that the decision to reduce these technologies was made after evaluating feedback from the ecosystem and observing low adoption rates.
At the same time, Google will retain a number of tools developed as part of the initiative, which have become quite widespread. These include Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS), which isolates cookie data for each website; Federated Credential Management API (FedCM), which provides secure login with limited data transfer; and Private State Tokens, which are designed for authentication to combat fraud.
