Comment by kivle
6 days ago
The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
The entire point of Privacy Sandbox is to get away from tracking individuals and allow ad targeting of anonymous cohorts (interest groups) instead.
https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/private-advert...
The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.
Blocking third-party cookies is a big privacy win. Getting untargeted ads is not something 99.9% of people care about and getting rid of actual real spying opportunities is great.
We all know this is going to push tracking server side but at least that makes it expensive and dangerous for companies that run it. Cloud costs for the hardware, and having to run third party code on your servers, built by known creeps.
But we should still make it harder on them.