Google’s fight to balance privacy and tracking

Why read this story?

Editor's note: Two weeks ago, Google announced the extension of its Privacy Sandbox initiative to Android. The news, which follows a similar announcement for its Google Chrome browser in January, deserves a great deal more attention than it has received. Privacy Sandbox includes a number of new tools and technologies meant to be the future of digital advertising, both on the web and on mobile, at the same time that a wave of privacy and regulatory concerns threatens the industry. Apple, in mid-2021, effectively killed the ability of advertisers and companies such as Facebook to track what users do across apps in order to better target them with ads; the iPhone maker had made it mandatory for apps to ask users for permission to track them elsewhere, and predictably almost everyone refused. Earlier still, starting in mid-to-late 2019, Apple’s Safari web browser started blocking third-party cookies, a move followed by Mozilla Firefox and some other smaller browsers. Third-party cookies, much like the advertising ID on iPhones, allowed advertisers and ad networks to follow a user across websites, gathering data on usage and …