The Privacy Sandbox Beta is coming to Android
Anthony Chavez, Google's VP of Privacy Sandbox, announced that The Privacy Sandbox Beta is coming to Android.
He said
Every day billions of people use mobile apps to stay informed, make decisions, be entertained, and much more. Digital advertising plays a key role in supporting the millions of developers who build and maintain these apps. And as people's reliance on apps has increased over time, so have their privacy expectations.
Last year, we announced the Privacy Sandbox on Android, an industry-wide initiative to raise the bar for user privacy and ensure continued access to free content and services. Building on our web efforts, we’re developing solutions for digital advertising that limit user data sharing and don't rely on cross-app identifiers.
Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with the industry to gather feedback and begin testing these new technologies. Today, we’re entering the next phase of this initiative, rolling out the first Beta for the Privacy Sandbox on Android to eligible devices. With the Beta, users and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these new solutions in the real world.
What this means for users
The Privacy Sandbox for Android Beta will roll out gradually, starting with a small percentage of Android 13 devices, and will expand over time. If your device is selected for the Beta, you’ll receive an Android notification letting you know.
The Privacy Sandbox Beta provides new APIs that are designed with privacy at the core, and don't use identifiers that can track your activity across apps and websites. Apps that choose to participate in the Beta can use these APIs to show you relevant ads and measure their effectiveness.
You’ll be able to control your Beta participation by going to the Privacy Sandbox section of Settings. From this screen you’ll be able to see and manage the interests that apps can use to show you relevant ads. For example, you could see that Android has estimated that you’re interested in topics like Movies or Outdoors, and you can block any topics if they don’t fit your interests. And if you change your mind about participating in the Beta, you can turn it off or back on in Settings.
Collaborating with the industry
Our goal with the Privacy Sandbox is to enhance user privacy while providing businesses with the tools to succeed online. Blunt approaches that don’t provide viable alternatives harm app developers, and they don’t work for user privacy either, leading to less private ways of tracking users like device fingerprinting.
This is why we’re working with the Android ecosystem to build solutions that protect users and work for developers.
Since announcing the Privacy Sandbox on Android, hundreds of companies have shared their feedback on our design proposals and developer previews. This feedback has been invaluable in shaping the designs, and we welcome further participation from organizations across the industry.
The Privacy Sandbox is a Google-led initiative to develop web standards for websites to access user information while maintaining privacy. [1] Its primary goal is to make online advertising more convenient without the use of third-party cookies. Federated Learning of Cohorts is part of the initiative, as are other proposed technologies, many of which have bird-themed names.It was revealed in August of 2019.
The initiative has been labeled anti-competitive, prompting an antitrust investigation.
Privacy Sandbox will be available on Android as well.
Model
The Privacy Sandbox proposals are based on advertising to cohorts rather than individuals. They generally put the web browser in charge of the user's privacy by offloading some of the data collection and processing required for advertising to the user's device. The Privacy Sandbox initiative has three goals: replacing cross-site tracking functionality, removing third-party cookies, and reducing the risk of device fingerprinting.
Proposals
In January 2020, Google invited advertising technology companies to join the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) in order to participate in the Privacy Sandbox proposal process. Wendy Seltzer is the IWABG's chairperson. The W3C is a consensus-building organization, and it would not stop Google from deploying technology in the absence of consensus.
Each proposal in the Privacy Sandbox initiative would perform one of the targeted advertising functions currently performed by cookies.
Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)/Topics API
Main article: Federated Learning of Cohorts
The Federated Learning of Cohorts algorithm analyzes users' browser online activity and generates a "cohort ID" using the SimHash algorithm to group a given user with other users who access similar content. Unlike other Privacy Sandbox proposals, FLoC proposes a new mechanism for targeted advertising rather than replacing existing cookie functions. Privacy advocates, data ethics researchers, and others have criticized the FLoC proposal. All major Chromium-based browsers have pledged to remove FLoC. Google discontinued FLoC development and proposed Topics API as a replacement. Web publishers have criticized the Topics API, which transfers information about user interests from one site to another, for enabling user tracking at the expense of publishers with unique content.
Proposals for serving advertisements
TURTLEDOVE
Google's TURTLEDOVE framework, which stands for "Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory," is a framework for serving ads through the browser.
Fledge
FLEDGE, which stands for "First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment," is a proposal that allows interested audiences to be targeted, including through retargeting. It enables advertising vendors to take an advertiser's website data and place users in interest groups specifically defined for a given advertiser, allowing users to see tailored ads while maintaining their privacy.
Topics API
The Topics API aims to enable advertisers to show relevant content and ads while protecting user privacy. It accomplishes this by recommending interest-based categories, or 'topics,' based on recent browsing history processed privately on the user device. The sites a user has visited are not shared across the internet in this proposal, unlike third-party cookies. The Topics API can be controlled by the user or completely disabled in Chrome's Settings.
Attribution Reporting API
The Attribution Reporting API tracks conversions when a user clicks on an ad or views a page, while blocking the ability to track users across multiple websites.
Private state tokens
Websites will be able to issue private state tokens to verify browsers whose behavior indicates a real person rather than a bot or malicious attacker. Private state tokens are encrypted to protect an individual's identity.
First-party sets
First-party sets will allow domains that belong to the same entity and have related sites with different domain names to declare themselves as a "first-party set" and be recognized as such. The exchange of information outside of a first-party set is restricted to protect users' privacy.
Shared Storage API
The Shared Storage API addresses the need for browsers to store information in different, multiple, unpartitioned forms in legitimate cases, rather than separately, as the prevention of cross-site tracking generally requires. Despite the fact that it is not partitioned, Shared Storage API ensures that data can only be read in a secure environment.
CHIPS
CHIPS (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State) recognize that certain embedded services require knowledge of a given user's activity on a site in order to function. CHIPS are partitioned cookies that inform browsers that the required cookie is only allowed to function between a specific site and an embedded widget.
Storage Partitioning
Storage Partitioning isolates specific web platform APIs used for storage or communication by an embedded service on a given site. This improves web privacy while maintaining web compatibility with existing sites.
Fenced Frames API
Fenced frames are an embedded frame type that is not allowed to communicate with a specific host page, making it safe to access its unpartitioned storage because it is impossible to join its identifier with the top site. FLEDGE-based will only be allowed to be displayed within Fenced Frames, though it is still permitted for current testing.
Network State Partitioning
Network State Partitioning divides a browser's network resources in order to prevent them from being shared across first-party contexts. It requires an additional "network partition key" for each request in order for resources to be reused, and it protects user privacy by preventing access to shared resources and metadata learned from loading other sites.
Federated Credential Management
Federated Credential Management is an API that will provide the primitives required to support previously reliant federated identity designs that relied on third-party cookies.
Same-site cookie label
Chrome and other browsers require same-site cookie labels to determine whether a cookie is used in a first- or third-party context. Cookies are thus protected from cross-site injection and data disclosure attacks.
Client Hints API
Client Hints API enables sites to request required information directly rather than through a User-Agent String, which is a significant surface vulnerable to passive fingerprinting, limiting the information that can be shared about a user online.
User-Agent Reduction
User Agent reduction reduces the amount of information in a User-Agent String, making it less vulnerable to passive fingerprinting.
HTTP Cache Partitioning
To add extra security, HTTP Cache Partitioning assigns cached resources a 'Network Isolation Key' along with the resource URL, which is made up of the top-level site and the current-frame site.
DNS-over-HTTPS
By encrypting Domain Name System (DNS) queries, the DNS-over-HTTPS protocol prevents attackers from observing the sites a user visits.
IP Protection
IP Protection is a proposal that would conceal the IP address of a user from third parties.
Privacy Budget
The Privacy Budget aims to limit fingerprinting by limiting the identifying information that a site can access.
Privacy Sandbox for Android
Privacy Sandbox for Android will use technology that does not use cross-app identifiers, such as Android/Google Advertising ID. The SDK (Software Development Kit) Runtime will limit covert tracking and the collection of user data through a process for third-party code, such as that used for advertising, that runs independently from the code of a given app.
The Attribution Reporting API is intended to replace current measurement methods for digital ads with solutions that do not rely on user-level tracking mechanisms.
Topics will present categories based on the use of apps on a user's device and are selected only through a given device's settings in order to continue to show relevant ads and content on Android. FLEDGE will use "custom audiences" built by app developers based on interactions with their app to supplement privacy on Android, information that will be stored locally so that no individual identifiers are shared with third parties.
Testing
Google announced the start of a single origin trial for the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs on March 31st, 2022. It enables sites to conduct unified experiments across APIs.
RTB House published its findings from actively testing FLEDGE by adding users to interest groups in October 2022. Google and Criteo also conducted tests. The report stated that, while the FLEDGE origin trials were positive, they were limited in scope. It was noted that a number of critical FLEDGE features, specifically k-anonymity requirements, were not available for testing and will need to be adjusted based on industry feedback.
The number of tests is growing. Google Chrome intends to devote H1 of 2023 to developer testing before making FLEDGE available to all Chrome users in H2 of 2023.
The Competition and Markets Authority issued a report on Google's quantitative testing of its Sandbox technologies in November 2022, emphasizing the importance of the industry adopting a common testing framework so that performance tests can be conducted more widely across multiple testing entities. Google is working with the CMA to create such a framework, and the company hopes to engage market participants in the design of testing between now and the start of General Availability in Q3 2023.
Antitrust concerns
In January 2021, the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced plans to investigate the Privacy Sandbox initiative, with a focus on its potential effects on both publishers and users. The preliminary investigation was supposed to last until July 2021. [needs to be updated] CMA CEO Andrea Coscelli said in a statement that "Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals could have a very significant impact on publishers like newspapers and the digital advertising market," and that there were also "privacy concerns to consider."
In March 2021, 15 attorneys general from the United States and Puerto Rico amended an antitrust complaint filed in December of the previous year; the updated complaint states that Google Chrome's phase-out of third-party cookies in 2022 will be detrimental "disable the primary cookie-tracking technology used by almost all non-Google publishers to track users and target ads. Then, dubbed Privacy Sandbox, Chrome will offer new and alternative tracking mechanisms. Overall, the modifications are anticompetitive ". According to the lawsuit, the proposed changes to the Privacy Sandbox would effectively require advertisers to use Google as a middleman to advertise.
On February 11, 2022, the CMA announced its decision to accept legally binding commitments from Google regarding its proposals to remove third-party cookies (TPCs) from Chrome and develop the Privacy Sandbox. The CMA's formal acceptance of these commitments resulted in the investigation being closed. Google was found not to be in violation of the Competition Act of 1998.
CMA reported in October 2022 that Google is fully complying with its legally binding commitments.
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