Google Set to Enable Privacy Sandbox in Chrome

After lots of fits and starts, Google is finally ready to slowly roll out Privacy Sandbox in Chrome, its replacement for cookies.

“The Privacy Sandbox is an initiative that aims to create technologies that both protect people’s privacy online and give developers tools to build thriving digital businesses,” Google explains in the release notes for Chrome version 115, which it released last week. “It aims to satisfy cross-site use cases without third-party cookies or other tracking mechanisms … In the past, third-party cookies and other mechanisms have been used to track user browsing behavior across sites to infer topics of interest. These mechanisms are being phased out as part of the Privacy Sandbox initiative.”

Google announced its plans to replace cookies with Privacy Sandbox back in 2019, and it later revealed that it would use a technology for interest-based advertising called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). But this solution proved unpopular with other Chromium-based browser makers, and so Google in 2021 delayed the rollout of Privacy Sandbox until 2023. A month later, it provided a more detailed schedule in which Privacy Sandbox would start rolling out in Q3 2023.

Well, it’s Q3 2023, and so I guess you could argue that it’s on track now. Google says that starting next week it will phase in Chrome APIs that pertain to Privacy Sandbox over time to users on Chrome 115, similar to what Microsoft often does with new Windows 11 features these days. By the beginning of August, about 60 percent of Chrome users will have these APIs enabled, and by the time Chrome 116 ships in mid-August, it should be just about fully rolled out.

Obviously, the big question here is how or if this change will impact the Chrome user experience. And from what I can tell, it should be minimal: Chrome users will get a management interface for this feature in the browser settings—for ad topics, site-suggested ads, and ad measurement data—but, most importantly, you can rely on Chrome to continue tracking your activities as you browse the web. That, at least, will not change.