Vice President of Google, overseeing the Privacy Sandbox project, has announced major changes in the development of technologies aimed at balancing users’ privacy with the needs of advertising networks and sites. The project, originally designed to replace third-party cookies in Chrome, is now being curtailed and certain technologies are being excluded from Chrome and Android.
The decision to block third-party cookies by default, which was scheduled for implementation in 2022, faced resistance from the industry and low technology adoption rates, resulting in repeated delays. Google has now opted to maintain the existing approach instead of moving forward with the planned changes. As a result, the promotion of several APIs and technologies intended to enhance privacy and enable advertising without user identification through third-party Cookies has been discontinued.
Among the APIs and technologies that will no longer be supported are:
- IP Protection – a feature that hides the user’s IP address from site owners by routing traffic through a chain of proxy servers, similar to using a VPN, to maintain user privacy.
- API Topics (replaced the FLoC API) – allows the categorization of user interests without identifying individual users, based on browsing activity and stored on the user’s device to provide ad networks with general interest information without specific user data.
- API Attribution Reporting – enables evaluation of advertising performance without compromising individual user privacy, with plans to transition to the W3C’s Ad Attribution API for aggregated statistics on ad effectiveness.
- Private Aggregation – a feature for aggregating data to protect user privacy.