Google has officially begun rolling out Privacy Sandbox to the bulk of its Chrome web browser users, roughly four months after announcing the intentions.
“We believe it is critical to improve privacy while also preserving access to information, whether it’s news, a how-to guide, or a fun video,” said Anthony Chavez, Google’s vice president of Privacy Sandbox projects.
“Without viable privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies, such as the Privacy Sandbox, we risk limiting information access for all users and incentivizing invasive tactics like fingerprinting.”
To that aim, Google will initially leave approximately three percent of users unaffected by the change in order to perform adequate testing. In the coming months, general availability is expected to extend to all consumers.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox is an umbrella term for a collection of technologies that try to replace third-party tracking cookies on the web with privacy-preserving alternatives while still offering personalized content and adverts.
In addition, the business is testing Privacy Sandbox on Android in beta on eligible mobile devices running Android 13.
A Topics API is central to the project, which sorts users into different topics (that can change over time) based on the sites visited and the frequency with which those sites are visited, and which websites can query to infer what topics a specific user is interested in and serve personalized ads without knowing who they are.
In other words, the web browser works as a go-between for the user and the website. Users can further customize their experience by selecting the ad themes they want to see, the relevance and measurement APIs they want enabled, or completely opting out of these functionalities.
Keywords: Google Privacy Sandbox rollout, Privacy-preserving web tracking, Topics API in Privacy Sandbox
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