Many social media users wonder about how they end up coming across advertisements for products they were just talking about moments ago, or products they need. Like discussing a certain type of pasta and then finding an advertisement for it while browsing social media, for example. Many internet users do not know that their choices and preferences are electronically saved through the sites they browse daily, allowing companies to learn more about them. The Google Privacy Sandbox initiative grew out of these concerns about privacy violation and spying.
The initiative seeks to develop a new technology that will improve people's privacy as they browse the web and apps on the Android system. The initiative also aspires to reduce individual tracking and provide safer alternatives to current technology, while keeping it open and available to everyone.
Google is a company that pays great attention to advertising and uses third-party cookies to track its users. A profile of a user's interests includes information about their favorite sports teams, foods, products, clothing, and entertainment.
Using these profiles, advertisements can be tailored to meet the users’ interests, which eventually increases their likelihood of clicking on and viewing the ads.
The tracking of cookies and fingerprints of devices exposes browsing histories to advertising platforms and advertisers. Essentially, the initiative aims to protect privacy by allowing advertisements to be chosen in a more secure manner.
According to the new initiative’s protocol, the users' online behavior would be analyzed locally instead of tracking users via cookies.
Google Chrome would monitor the browsing activity of internet users and group them with other users who share the same tastes and habits. Chrome then reports this group to websites that make use of the initiative services.
This means that, rather than letting third-party websites track your browsing activity, Google Chrome will do it itself - locally - and report what kind of advertisements that might interest you to the websites you visit. By default, all Chrome users have the Privacy Sandbox beta enabled.
Google piloted the initiative technology in early 2021 for 0.5 percent of Chrome users in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. The company announced in 2019 that it would gradually stop supporting third-party cookies.
In 2021, the company published a revised timeline for the phase-out of third-party cookies over three months, ending in late 2023.
During this time, the Privacy Sandbox initiative was launched, a project to develop technologies that protect people's privacy online. A simple setting within the Google Chrome browser can be changed to disable the Privacy Sandbox.
The main reason for Google's gradual withdrawal of support for third-party cookies is this concern about users’ privacy. The information that can be collected by cookies can be unlimited and very detailed, which can lead to the misuse of personal data and breach of privacy.
Additionally, users are becoming more aware of the importance of privacy, which has led to the emergence of several privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
As part of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, new technical core goals have been set to protect information, including the ability for people to browse and experience the app without worrying about what personal information is being collected by whom. In addition to banning secret tracking technologies, the initiative will allow publishers and developers to keep their content online for free.
First, the Google Privacy Sandbox initiative will eliminate cookies as we know them today, and second, trust tokens will counter spam and fraud on the web. By using trust tokens, websites will be able to distinguish real users from bots or malicious attackers.
Misbar’s Sources
Translated by Jehan Batrawi
