Google Quietly Dismantles Core of Privacy Sandbox for Chrome

Google is sunsetting a large portion of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, just two years after it began rolling out the platform across Chrome and Android.

In a surprise pivot, the tech giant is narrowing its focus to fewer APIs with broader adoption, while discontinuing many controversial technologies, including Topics, Attribution Reporting, and Protected Audience.

This marks a notable retreat from the expansive technical framework originally promised when Privacy Sandbox was introduced as an alternative to third-party cookies. The decision follows feedback from publishers, advertisers, developers, and other stakeholders over the past year.

The Privacy Sandbox, initially launched in 2023, was Google’s multi-part initiative to enable targeted advertising and ad measurement without third-party cookies. At its core, the framework was designed to offer user-centric privacy controls while still preserving the economic model of the web, namely, ad-funded content and services. However, many of its technologies, such as the Topics API and Protected Audience, were widely criticized for embedding tracking mechanisms directly into Chrome, prompting accusations that Google was merely replacing external tracking with first-party surveillance.

In this latest update, Google confirmed that it is retiring the following key technologies across both Chrome and Android:

• Attribution Reporting API
• Protected Audience
• Topics API
• IP Protection
• On-Device Personalization
• Private Aggregation and Shared Storage
• Protected App Signals
• Related Website Sets
• SelectURL
• SDK Runtime

These APIs will be phased out following the established deprecation processes on Chrome and Android, with further updates promised on Google’s developer site.

Among the remaining technologies, Google plans to continue supporting:

1. CHIPS (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State), which offers improved cookie isolation to reduce cross-site tracking.
2. FedCM (Federated Credential Management), designed to streamline authentication and identity flows.
3. Private State Tokens, which allow websites to verify legitimate users without tracking individuals.

Google will also shift focus to working on an interoperable Attribution standard through the W3C’s Private Advertising Technology Working Group. This move reflects the industry’s call for standardized, privacy-preserving ad measurement tools that are supported across browsers and platforms, not just within Chrome.

The Privacy Sandbox was initially introduced in response to rising regulatory pressure and growing public awareness around invasive tracking. It aimed to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, a move already completed by competitors like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari years earlier. Chrome, with over 60% of the global browser market share, has long been seen as a laggard in this respect, due, in part, to Google’s reliance on ad revenues.

Despite its privacy branding, critics argued that technologies like Topics and Protected Audience still enabled user profiling, just under a new label and with tighter integration into Google’s ecosystem. The Electronic Frontier Foundation went so far as to label the overall approach as “re-inventing the tracking wheel.”