Google’s Dream of a Privacy-Friendly Ad Model Just Officially Died

Google has quietly killed something you’ve probably never used or heard of: Privacy sandbox. Either way you should mourn this death, because its impact is dire.

Basically it means six years‘ Value of work towards Expiring third-party cookies In Chrome—which eventually made cookies obsolete in all major browsers—nothing.

Reading within the lines of Google’s bureaucratic language aimed at not alienating advertisers, the privacy sandbox appears to be a Hail Mary attempt to move away from the invasive cookies that track us all online, with their famously vague and seemingly mandatory approach to consent.

The dream was a built-in Chrome system that would allow data used for ad customization to be streamed live to your device. This system used AI to sort you into relevant groups of users with specific characteristics. If it worked, advertisers would still be allowed to target you with ads, but without tracking you as an individual

Needless to say, that too would have ended Those horrible pop ups.

But according to a announcement Anthony Chavez, the Google VP in charge of the privacy sandbox initiative, said Friday that “low levels of adoption” have led Google to “retire” a long list of privacy sandbox technologies. Ad Week Then it became clear that this long list of dead sub-projects also led to the end of the larger initiative. According to a spokesperson quoted by Adweek, Google is “moving away from privacy sandbox branding”.

This is especially frustrating for cookie haters because later Years of delayEarly last year, it started to look like Google was making big strides. Last January Google ended cookie support for approx 30 million Chrome users, and it’s a roll out next month Privacy-focused preview version For the Android operating system, the new ad system is aimed at faster adoption. with almost 65% of browser market share At the time, the widespread adoption of the privacy sandbox system in Chrome could signal to advertisers that the cookie era is over.

And apparently, it didn’t take. In April of this year, it became clear that a Google-led effort to end cookies was on the ropes when Chavez wrote That Google will maintain its “current approach to offering users third-party cookie choices in Chrome” and that it “will not introduce a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.” This latest announcement is the final nail in the coffin of Google’s cookie-free internet plans.

We’ve reached out to Google to find out if this means that Google is moving to full-throated support of third-party cookies or switching to another alternative plan. We’ll update when we hear back.

But with the privacy sandbox completely gone, it’s clear that somewhere along the line, the long-delayed plan fizzled. Individual tracking of users is a load-bearing structure of the free, ad-supported Internet, and that’s not about to change.