What is Privacy Sandbox and how does it impact you?

Privacy Sandbox is the name given to the collection of changes Google intends to make to the web. Despite the name Privacy Sandbox does not improve anyone’s privacy, it merely restricts the number of organisations that know even more about individuals.

Google’s web site – privacysandbox.com – indicates when each element of Privacy Sandbox will be implemented and when you must have altered your digital services. should Movement for an Open Web not be successful in changing the approach.

The following table explains each of the components in non-engineering terms, list non technology sectors that are impacted, and links to more information maintained at prebid.org.

Name	Summary	Impact	Link
Third Party Cookie Removal	Removes the ability for different registerable domains (e.g. bbc.co.uk or bbc.com) to share information with one another even when they have peoples consent to do so.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
Trust Tokens API	Enables one party to inform another party that a person is genuine (not a robot) without disclosing the personal details of the individual. The party receiving the trust token must trust the party sending it to have performed the verification.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
FLoC API	Web browsers will be assigned to one of 32,000 numeric identifiers based on browsing history. Advertisers will need to work out the interest the group the numeric identifier relates to and determine if they want to displaying advertising.	Advertising, Publishing	More
FLEDGE API
Core Attribution API		Advertising, Publishing
Attribution Reporting API		Advertising, Publishing
Cross-Environment Attribution API		Advertising, Publishing
Aggregation Service Reference		Advertising, Publishing
First-Party Sets API	Some businesses operate registerable domain names (e.g. google.com and youtube.com). When third party cookies are removed, they want a way to continue to operate as if they were a single domain.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
Shared Storage API	Prompts the user to decide if data can be shared between different registerable domain names (e.g. yourdomain.com and analytics-tool.com).	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
CHIPS API
Storage Partitioning
Fenced Frames API	Elements of a web page can be displayed to the user without having any knowledge about the page they are contained within. Likely to replace iFrames that are a building block of the modern web.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
Network State Partitioning
SameSite Cookies	Prevents data that is written to a specific URL (e.g. example.com/news) from being read by another (e.g. www.example.com/articles) despite both URLs relating to a single registerable domain name.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
User-Agent Client Hints API	Communicate browser, platform and device model information between websites and web browsers by requiring the website to explicitly request the information rather than being provided with it by default. Place restrictions on such requests to suppliers to web site operators.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
HTTP Cache Partitioning	Prevents data that was retrieved by one registerable domain from being available to another without being fetched again.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
DNS-over-HTTPS	When a domain name (e.g. example.com) is converted into an IP address to enable data to flow between the web browser and the web site the web browser will no longer use the directory that contains this mapping provided by the Internet Service Provider it will instead use a service that it has chosen.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
WebID API	Sign in and services will be required to use features controlled by the web browser to facilitate login. Existing login services will be considered legacy in time therefore requiring all websites with login capability to adopt WebID.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
User-Agent Reduction	Remove the existing standard for transferring information associated with the device, platform and browser thus breaking all analytics, fraud, optimisation, performance and security solutions that don’t migrate to the inferior User-Agent Client Hints.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
Gnatcatcher	Prevent a web site operator knowing the IP address of the device that someone is using by routing all web traffic via Google’s data centres.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities
Origin-Bound Cookies
Privacy Budget	Place the web browser in the position of deciding whether a website is trust worthy enough to be allowed access to information that is removed via the other items.	Advertising, Automotive, Charities, Retailers, Finance, Government, Publishing, Telecoms, Travel, Utilities

Many of these changes are a work in progress. You can influence their development by joining the W3C and providing feedback to Google, or Movement for an Open Web.

Almost all of these changes do not impact Google. Google’s control of the web browser and other essential services such as search, maps, mobile, email and advertising means they have alternatives available only to themselves.