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

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.

Reading between the lines of Google’s bureaucratic language aimed at not alienating advertisers, Privacy Sandbox seems to have been a Hail Mary effort to shift away from the invasive cookies that track us all online, with their famously murky and seemingly coerced approach to consent.

The dream was a built-in Chrome system that would have allowed the data used for ad customization to live on your device. This system would have used AI to sort you into relevant groups of users with certain traits. Had it worked, advertisers would have still been allowed to target you with ads, but without tracking you as an individual.

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

But according to an announcement Friday by Anthony Chavez, the Google VP in charge of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, “low levels of adoption” have led Google to “retire” a long list of Privacy Sandbox technologies. AdWeek then managed to get confirmation that this long list of dead sub-projects also spells the end of the broader initiative. Google will be “moving away from the Privacy Sandbox branding,” according to a spokesperson quoted by Adweek.

This is especially depressing for cookie haters because after years of delays, early last year, it was starting to look like Google was making major progress. Last January Google ended cookie support for about 30 million Chrome users, and the following month it rolled out a privacy-focused preview version of the Android operating system, aimed at speeding adoption of the new ad regime. With about 65% of the browser market share at the time, mass adoption of the Privacy Sandbox system in Chrome could have signaled to advertisers that the cookie era was over.

And apparently, it never took. 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 would maintain its “current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome,” and that it would “not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies.” This latest announcement is the final nail in the coffin of Google’s cookie-free internet plan.

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

But 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.