Third-party cookies are a privacy nightmare, making it possible for advertisers and bad actors to sniff through big chunks of your browsing history, all in the name of providing more relevant ads. While third-party cookies provide some benefits to websites and users, the consensus is that we need alternatives that are easier to reign in, control, and understand. Google has been pushing its Privacy Sandbox as an alternative to third-party cookies for years, and now, a few more features from said sandbox are shipping in the latest version of Chrome, 115.
As Google alreadyexplained in a blog post in May, the company is right within its schedule when it comes to the Chrome 115 launch. With the new release, Google is making a handful of APIs available that are meant to help with gauging relevance. Among them are Topics, Protected Audience, Attribution Reporting, Private Aggregation, Shared Storage, and Fenced Frames.
In typical Google fashion, the APIs aren’t available to be used on all Chrome installs just yet. They are instead rolled out in stages over the full four-week lifespan of Chrome 115, with Google monitoring the progress for issues. In mid-August, Google wants to have 99% availability. At the same time, the company is ending the so-called origin trial for these APIs on September 20, meaning that the testing phase will be over and developers can rely on the features to be available on most Chrome installations.
In a nutshell, the Privacy Sandbox is presented as an open, industry-wide standard that attempts to fix the privacy nightmare that third-party cookies entail. It moves the user tracking into the browser itself, running securely locally, and then only sends specific bits of relevant, anonymized data to websites and advertisers, like which products or topics someone visiting a website could be interested in. This is supposed to eliminate the need for advertisers and publishers to track users themselves.
Privacy Sandbox and some of its initial ideas like FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) was met witha lot of criticism from privacy watchdogs like the EFF. Google pivoted based on the feedback and created different approaches such as the now-launching Protected Audience, which don’t seem to have garnered the same kind of criticism. Competitors like Brave are stillpushing back against Privacy Sandbox, partially due to antitrust concerns.
The full feature set of Privacy Sandbox is supposed to be rolled out by Q3 2023, which starts in October this year. Third-party cookies should be phased out by Q3 2024 over a two-month period, though thisdate was postponed in the past.
