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Google’s Eroding Sandbox
Google just stepped away from plans to let users nuke third-party tracking cookies. Why and what’s the impact?
Google announced their Privacy Sandbox initiative in August 2019 with the intention to “develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web.” The Privacy Sandbox aimed to develop solutions to assist people with their privacy online and within Android apps while still enabling companies to profit from their sites and from targeted advertising.
Reality—or, at least, the market—has a way of intervening though.
Canceling a Cookie Apocalypse
For the last few years then, business worried about a so-called “Cookie Apocalypse” that would have resulted from a primary directive of this privacy initiative. In what might have been a huge win for people’s privacy, Google announced that they would update their popular Chrome browser to prevent companies from tracking your browsing behavior across the internet via third-party cookies. Privacy advocates generally considered this move a big win. Google rolled out updates to the browser in January 2024 for just one percent of users and planned to apply them for all users by Q3. Unsurprisingly, many advertisers were not happy with these developments. Critics also…
