Google’s Ambitious Privacy Sandbox Project Signals Its End

Google has quietly killed something you’ve probably never used or heard of: Privacy Sandbox. You should mourn this death anyway, because the consequences are dire.

This basically means that the work that took six years to end third-party cookies in Chrome — which may have eventually made cookies obsolete across all major browsers — has come to nothing.

Reading between the lines of Google’s bureaucratic language intended not to alienate advertisers, the Privacy Sandbox appears to have been an effort to move away from the invasive cookies that track us all online, with their famously vague and seemingly coercive approach to consent.

The dream was a built-in Chrome system that would allow data used to personalize ads to stay on your device. This system could have used artificial intelligence to classify you into relevant groups of users with certain traits. If it worked, advertisers would be able to target you with ads, but not track you as an individual.

Needless to say, it would also have put an end to those awful pop-ups.

But according to an announcement on Friday by Anthony Chavez, Google’s vice president in charge of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, “low levels of adoption” have prompted Google to “retire” a long list of Privacy Sandbox technologies. AdWeek was then able to obtain confirmation that this long list of dead subprojects also meant the end of the broader initiative. Google will move away from the Privacy Sandbox brand, according to a spokesperson cited by Adweek.

This is especially frustrating for cookie haters because after years of delays, early last year, it started to look like Google was making significant progress. Last January, Google ended cookie support for about 30 million Chrome users, and the following month rolled out a privacy-focused preview version of the Android operating system, aiming to speed up adoption of the new advertising system. With about 65% of the browser market share at the time, the mass adoption of Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox could have been a signal to advertisers that the cookie era was over.

And apparently, it never took. In April of this year, it became clear that the Google-led effort to end cookies was on the verge of failure when Chavez wrote that Google would maintain its “current approach of offering users the option of third-party cookies in Chrome,” and that it would “not introduce a new, standalone third-party cookie requirement.” This latest announcement is the final nail in the coffin of Google’s cookie-free internet plan.

We’ve reached out to Google to find out if this means Google will switch to full support for third-party cookies, or switch to another plan. We’ll update if we hear back.

But with Privacy Sandbox all but gone, it’s clear that somewhere along the line, a long-deferred plan failed. Individual tracking of users is a load-bearing structure for the free, ad-supported Internet, and that’s not about to change.