Privacy sandbox
Google's privacy sandbox project is a series of proposals to satisfy cross-site use cases without requiring third-party cookies or other tracking mechanisms, preparing for a future web in which third-party cookies have been removed. Themes include identity and tracking protection, more privacy-respecting ad solutions, preventing covert tracking, and safely sharing data across browsing contexts.
Warning: Some of these features are currently opposed by one or more browser vendors. See specific API entry points for more details.
Note: Google Chrome deprecated some of Privacy Sandbox features and suspended enrollment of new organizations into Privacy Sandbox console. Some Privacy Sandbox features require enrollment. See enrollment section for details.
Privacy sandbox features
- Attribution Reporting API
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Enables developers to measure conversions — for example when a user clicks an ad embedded on one site and then proceeds to purchase the item over on the vendor's site — and then access reports on those conversions. It does this without relying on third-party tracking cookies.
- Bounce tracking mitigations
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Bounce tracking mitigations protect users against bounce tracking by identifying tracker sites via a heuristic and periodically deleting cookies and other state data associated with them.
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Also known as partitioned cookies, CHIPS allows developers to opt a cookie into partitioned storage, with a separate cookie jar per top-level site.
- Fenced Frame API
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Provides functionality for controlling content embedded in
<fencedframe>elements, which enable content to be embedded while solving the privacy issues of<iframe>s. - Private State Token API
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Provides a mechanism for conveying trust in a user's authenticity from one browsing context to another, without sharing the user's identity or allowing their activity across websites to be tracked.
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A mechanism for a company to declare relationships between different sites. Supporting browsers will then allow limited third-party cookie access across those sites for specific purposes, via the Storage Access API.
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A client-side storage mechanism that enables unpartitioned, cross-site data access while preserving privacy (i.e., without relying on tracking cookies).
- Topics API
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Provides a mechanism for developers to implement use cases such as interest-based advertising (IBA) based on topics collected by the browser as the user navigates different pages, rather than collected by the developer by tracking the user's journey around different sites with third-party cookies.
Enrollment
Google deprecated some Privacy Sandbox features and suspended enrollment of new websites and organizations into the Privacy Sandbox Console.
Features requiring enrollment
The following features require enrollment to be usable:
- Attribution Reporting API
- Protected Audience API
- Private Aggregation API
- Shared Storage API
- Topics API
The documentation of each feature includes more details on exactly which sub-features will fail if enrollment is not completed, and how.
See also
- The Privacy Sandbox on privacysandbox.google.com