A major setback for user privacy.
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
Republished on October 19 with a stark response to Google’s confirmation that the privacy nightmare for Chrome users has now come true.
Apple warns iPhone users to stop using Google Chrome, and Microsoft has issued the same warning for Windows users. Now Google has confirmed more bad news for Chrome’s 3 billion users. Is it time to quit the world’s most popular browser?
Google’s plan to kill tracking cookies in Chrome centered on its Privacy Sandbox. This explored alternatives to cookies, which sought a balance between user privacy, the ad industry and regulators. That balance was never found. The focus on privacy is over.
Google has suddenly confirmed privacy initiatives “are being phased out.” The Privacy Sandbox, now in its sixth year, has essentially ended just months after Google confirmed tracking is here to stay and there are no viable alternatives.
The scale of this reversal is huge. “Google’s Privacy Sandbox is officially dead,” AdWeek reports, with Google telling the industry outlet “the entire project is being retired.”
The Privacy Sandbox has been fraught with issues since its inception. Its first initiative, the so-called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) was infamously pilloried by Apple’s “Flock” remake of Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” promoting Safari at Chrome’s expense.
The list of initiatives now retiring “in light of their low levels of adoption,” include: Attribution Reporting API, IP Protection, On-Device Personalization, Private Aggregation, Protected Audience, Protected App Signals, Related Website Sets, SelectURL, SDK Runtime and Topics. In short, pretty much everything.
Responses to Google’s confirmation that the Privacy Sandbox is essentially dead have been are stark. Per Gizmodo, “Google just quietly killed something you may never have used or heard of: Privacy Sandbox. You should grieve this death anyway, because the implications are grim. This basically means six years’ worth of work toward ending third-party cookies in Chrome—which might have ultimately made cookies obsolete across all major browsers — has amounted to nothing.”
PPC Land says “Chrome kills most Privacy Sandbox technologies after adoption fails. Google retires nine Privacy Sandbox APIs following years of development, low uptake, and widespread industry criticism of the cookie replacement initiative.”
“Google has killed Privacy Sandbox,” Engadget says.
The irony for privacy advocates is that none of the negative headlines in the last two years — including stay of execution for tracking cookies and rebirth of digital fingerprinting — have dented Chrome’s dominance on mobile or desktops.
Chrome now has more than 70% of both the mobile and desktop global markets. The only threat on the horizon comes from new AI browsers, including Perplexity’s Comet and an eagerly anticipated option from Open AI.
There again, Google is rushing out advanced to maintain its lock, with its recent Gemini in Chrome upgrade designed to keep the upstart AI browsers at bay. Again, privacy warnings have already been issued, with Gemini harvesting more user data than the alternatives. But, again, it seems unlikely to make a difference to user adoption.
That said, Gizmodo warns “with Privacy Sandbox completely gone, it’s clear that somewhere along the line, the long deferred plan fizzled. Individual tracking of users is a load-bearing structure of the free, ad-supported internet, and that’s not about to change.” And when it comes to Google’s stewardship of the global internet, perhaps that’s the most surprisingly unsurprising news of all.
