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Privacy Sandbox for the Web reaches general availability

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Sep 07, 2023
Anthony Chavez

VP, Privacy Sandbox

Today, we mark a major milestone for the Privacy Sandbox for the Web, reaching "general availability" on Chrome for the relevance and measurement APIs. This milestone is a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web.

How We Got Here

We introduced the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019 to improve privacy across the web (and Android) while continuing to provide businesses with the tools they need to succeed. Since then, we've collaborated with a wide range of stakeholders – including publishers, developers, adtech providers, consumers, and more – to design and develop new solutions that can achieve this goal.

We’ve taken this approach because we believe it is vital to both improve privacy and preserve access to information, whether it’s news, a how-to-guide, or a fun video. Without viable privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies, such as the Privacy Sandbox, we risk reducing access to information for all users, and incentivizing invasive tactics such as fingerprinting.

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General availability of the Privacy Sandbox APIs means advertising providers and developers can now scale usage of these new technologies within their products and services, as these are now available for the majority of Chrome users.1

New User Controls

We've also rolled out new Ad privacy controls in Chrome that allow people to manage how the Privacy Sandbox technologies may be used to deliver the ads they see. These controls allow users to tailor their experience by customizing what ad topics they’re interested in, what relevance and measurement APIs they want enabled, and more.

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You can view these controls by visiting Settings > Privacy and security > Ad privacy controls in Chrome, and can find additional information about the new ads privacy features on our Help Center.

The Benefits of Collaboration

We wouldn’t have been able to reach this milestone without collaboration across the industry, and we are grateful for all the stakeholders who have engaged with the technologies to date.

The future of commerce media hinges on scalable, open-source solutions that respect consumer expectations, and today’s milestone gives Criteo and other industry players a valuable opportunity to ramp up testing efforts and gain deeper insight into the utility of the Privacy Sandbox APIs. Criteo remains committed to investing in the Privacy Sandbox, a key element of our multi-faceted approach to addressability, and we look forward to maintaining our strong collaboration with Chrome.


Todd Parsons
Chief Product Officer
Criteo

Ads personalization on the free and open internet is moving towards privacy by design. Collectively, we have work to do to ensure market readiness before 3rd party cookie deprecation in the second half of 2024. IAB believes the future will be a portfolio of interoperable tools, techniques and standards, and Privacy Sandbox will undoubtedly be an important solution. We are pleased the industry has the opportunity to test new tools in Chrome, and highly encourage continued efforts to collaborate across the ecosystem.


David Cohen
CEO
IAB US

Mediavine is all about helping content creators build sustainable businesses. Supporting publishers, now and in the future, means scaled testing of privacy-centric alternatives to third-party cookies. That’s why we’re excited to see Privacy Sandbox reach general availability in Chrome. This enables us to confidently prepare our tech and the businesses built on top of it ahead of third-party cookie deprecation.


Brad Hagmann
Senior Vice President of Advertising Technology
Mediavine

NextRoll is deeply committed to making the web a more privacy-friendly space, so we are excited to expand our testing with the Privacy Sandbox APIs. We’re eager to partner with other early participants to secure the future of the open web by preserving the effectiveness of online advertising.


Kevin Nolan
Sr. Director, Data & Supply Partnerships
NextRoll

General Availability in Chrome enables us to evaluate key Privacy Sandbox technologies at scale as we continue to accelerate our own innovation on behalf of our advertisers. We aim to make advertising on Pinterest easy and effective for brands through these critical third-party attribution solutions and our powerful first party signals, while protecting the privacy of consumers.


Samir Pradhan
Vice President, Head of Ads Product Management
Pinterest

At PrimeAudience, the first ad network built on top of Privacy Sandbox APIs, we are pleased to see increased availability of privacy-preserving ads APIs in Chrome. This will allow us to take our experiments to the next level and formulate testing hypotheses for the first quarter of 2024 when 1% of Chrome users will go entirely cookieless. We invite other leaders and pioneers in the advertising space to join us in creating a thriving privacy-first open web.


Mateusz Rumiński
VP of Product
PrimeAudience

We know that a personalized internet is here to stay. The benefits to brands, consumers, and publishers are too great for it to go away. But as an industry we have to be able to accomplish this in a more secure and private way. Privacy Sandbox is reinventing how the infrastructure that makes this possible works, so as an industry and as leaders in Latin America we believe that it’s our duty to lean in and engage.


Santi Darmandrail
COO
Retargetly

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This is an important step towards improving privacy for the ads that help fund a free and open web, but the work doesn’t stop here.

Solution Integration and Effectiveness Testing

General availability means the Privacy Sandbox technologies are in a stable state, and ready for scaled use by advertising solutions to support key business use cases. Having reached this stage after extensive industry feedback, we don’t plan to make any significant changes to the API interfaces ahead of third-party cookie deprecation. Companies integrating the Privacy Sandbox APIs into their solutions can now scale their deployment and testing to assess readiness for the planned deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024. This includes experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the Privacy Sandbox, in compliance with our Commitments and in consultation with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and specific testing groups facilitated by Chrome.

Starting in Q4 of 2023, we’ll enable the industry to bolster their testing efforts with the ability to simulate the deprecation of third-party cookies for a percentage of their users. Then, in Q1 of 2024, we’ll turn off third-party cookies for 1 percent of all Chrome users, further establishing the environments necessary for testing the effectiveness of the Privacy Sandbox APIs.

A Farewell to Third-Party Cookies

The countdown to the planned deprecation of third-party cookies is in full effect.  We look forward to continuing to partner with the industry on this transition, including supporting the adoption of Privacy Sandbox APIs and evaluating their effectiveness through scaled testing.

1. We’ll expand general availability to 100 percent of users over the coming months, but are initially leaving ~3 percent of users unaffected by the change in order to ensure our ability to conduct adequate A/B testing for the change.

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