Back in 2022, Google surprised most of the web-browsing world with the announcement of the Privacy Sandbox, a multi-year initiative to phase out third-party cookies and limit tracking. Two years later, Google has now announced that Privacy Sandbox won’t be quite as robust as that original vision.
In a blog post titled “A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web,” Google describes “an updated approach [to Privacy Sandbox] that elevates user choice.” Rather than eliminating third-party cookies on the web, Google is instead developing “a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.” Translation: It’ll be hidden several tabs deep in Settings and hard to find unless you look for it.
And we don’t even know if the original goals will be intact—to “make current tracking mechanisms obsolete, and block covert tracking techniques, like fingerprinting”—if and when it does arrive. Google only says it will “continue to consult with the CMA, ICO and other regulators globally” as it finalizes its approach.
It’s somewhat ironic that this move comes about a week after Apple starting running a new ad called “Flock” set to the creepy song “Billathi Askara” by Björn Jason Lindh. In the 2-minute spot, people are seen using Android-like phones while creepy surveillance cameras with wings follow them around like a horror movie—until people using Safari instead of presumably Chrome causes them all to explode before they get too close.
The message is that Safari protects your privacy while Chrome doesn’t. Apple has numerous features built into Safari designed to protect users, including Intelligent Tracking Prevention and fingerprinting defense. Privacy Sandbox would have gone a long way toward showing people that this ad isn’t an accurate representation of Chrome on Android phones, but now that the initiative is delayed and significantly watered down, it’s going to be hard to make that case.
Google says the revamped Privacy Sandbox is still being developed and doesn’t provide a date for release. It does say, however, that it “look[s] forward to continued collaboration with the ecosystem on the next phase of the journey to a more private web.”