UPDATED 18:54 EDT / APRIL 22 2025

APPS

Google scales back cookie-focused Privacy Sandbox initiative

Google LLC is scaling back Privacy Sandbox, an initiative it launched in 2019 to reduce the advertising industry’s use of third-party cookies.

Privacy Sandbox Vice President Anthony Chavez announced the move in a blog post published today.

Third-party cookies are small files that an advertiser installs on consumers’ devices to track their browsing history. The technology allows a brand to gather information about user activity in not only its own website but also other online properties. In many cases, the collected data is used to deliver personalized ads that follow consumers across the web.

Google launched Privacy Sandbox in 2019 to develop a more privacy-friendly alternative to third-party cookies. Originally, the company planned to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. It subsequently pushed back the deadline three times before scrapping the plan last July.

The move may have been influenced by the antitrust scrutiny that Privacy Sandbox drew in the U.K. Several of Google’s competitors in the advertising technology market rely on third-party cookies to power their services. The U.K.’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority, was concerned Google’s plans to block third-party cookies in Chrome would have harmed those rivals.

Officials ended the probe in 2023 after the search giant made a series of antitrust commitments. Last year, however, the CMA and another U.K. regulator reportedly raised new concerns about Privacy Sandbox.

After scrapping its push to block third-party cookies last year, Google adopted a new plan. The search giant set out to equip Chrome with an opt-out tool that would have allowed users to manually disable such cookies. In today’s blog post, Chavez detailed that Google is no longer moving forward with the effort. 

“The adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies has accelerated, new opportunities to safeguard and secure people’s browsing experiences with AI have emerged, and the regulatory landscape around the world has evolved considerably,” Chavez wrote. “Taking all of these factors into consideration, we’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.”

The company also plans to revise the development roadmap of the technologies that power Privacy Sandbox. Google will “share an updated roadmap for these technologies, including our future areas of investment, in the coming months,” Chavez detailed.

The flagship component of Privacy Sandbox is Topics API, a feature that rolled out to Chrome in 2023. It generates a list of topics in which users are interested based on their browsing history. The feature makes those topics available to advertisers without sharing the underlying browsing history as third-party cookies do, which improves privacy.

Google also developed a number of other technologies as part of the initiative. One, CHIPS, allows advertisers to install cookies on consumer devices but significantly limits how data from those cookies may be accessed. Another technology called RWS makes it easier to share data between websites that are operated by the same company. 

Image: Google

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