Privacy Sandbox APIs set to launch in Chrome from July

Abner Li | May 18 2023 - 6:00 am PT

Google’s work on Privacy Sandbox continues with key APIs for publishers and advertisers going live in the Chrome browser starting this July.

Last year, Google announced it was delaying when Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies to the second half of 2024 after previously targeting 2022 and 2023. As that final date approaches, Privacy Sandbox’s replacement relevance and measurement APIs will become available to “all Chrome users” from July (version 115) onward.

These privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies include:

Topics: “Generate signals for interest-based advertising without third-party cookies or other user identifiers that track individuals across sites.”
Protected Audience (previously called “FLEDGE”): “Select ads to serve remarketing and custom audience use cases, designed to mitigate third-party tracking across sites.”
Attribution Reporting: “Correlate ad clicks or ad views with conversions.”
Private Aggregation: “Generate aggregate data reports using data from Protected Audience and cross-site data from Shared Storage.”
Shared Storage: “Allow unlimited, cross-site storage write access with privacy-preserving read access.”
Fenced Frames: “Securely embed content onto a page without sharing cross-site data.”

This milestone will allow sites to “conduct scaled, live-traffic testing.”

Prior to third-party cookie deprecation, we don’t plan to make any significant changes to the API interfaces

After these APIs go live later this year, Google in Q1 of 2024 will “deprecate third-party cookies for one percent of Chrome users” to allow further real-world testing.

This plan has been developed in consultation with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), in accordance with our Commitments and public timeline. We will continue to address comments made by the CMA, as we prepare for third-party cookie deprecation beyond one percent of Chrome users once the CMA has completed its assessment.