Google Starts the GA Rollout of Its Privacy Sandbox APIs To All Chrome Users

Google continues the rollout of its Privacy Sandbox APIs -- its replacement for tracking cookies for the online advertising industry. From a report: Today, right on schedule and in time for the launch of Chrome 115 into the stable release channel, Google announced that it will now start enabling the relevance and measurement APIs in its browser. This will be a gradual rollout, with Google aiming for a 99% availability by mid-August. At this point, Google doesn't expect to make any major changes to the APIs. This includes virtually all of the core Privacy Sandbox features, including Topics, Protected Audience, Attribution Reporting, Private Aggregation, Shared Storage and Fenced Frames. It's worth noting that for the time being, Privacy Sandbox will run in parallel with third-party cookies in the browser. It won't be until early 2024 that Google will deprecate third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users. After that, the process will speed up though and Google will deprecate these cookies for all users by the second half of 2024.

Odd!

[oldgraybeard]

I don't see anything here that I as a user would care about.

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[CaptQuark]

If you use Firefox as your main browser, not much of it matters anyway.

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[AmiMoJo]

It's part of Google's drive to end the use of third party cookies and other cross-site tracking. Once this new API is established they can start removing support for other stuff, improving privacy for everyone.

And yes, you can trivially block the new APIs, or simply turn the feature off in the browser. Which I highly recommend you do.

Google's data is more valuable than money

[xack]

Since they refuse to release a Google Premium [slashdot.org], I can only assume they get more value from data than any paid subscription would. I don't like being forced to use ad blockers, but the enshittification of the internet at large has made it a necessity. Most people can't afford anything in this economy except the homelessness protection racket (euphemistically known as "rent" or "mortgage") right now, so they are advertising to the void.

Meh

[liqu1d]

Theyâ(TM)ve delayed cookie deprecation twice now. I wouldnâ(TM)t be too surprised about a third one. Besides this hands them a lot more power when it comes to ad spend. This will help continuing to cement the monopoly.

How many years has it been?

[WaffleMonster]

Since Firefox siloed third party cookies by top site by default? What's amazing is they somehow managed to pull it off without ADDING new anti-privacy malware to their browsers or anyone noticing breakage.

Obviously completely unrealistic to expect the same from Google. Instead what we all really need are our browsers conducting auctions for our attention... you just can't make this shit up.

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[AmiMoJo]

If Google did it they would be investigated by regulators for attacking their rival's advertising businesses.

I don't know what you have heard but this has nothing to do with auctions. The Topics API has the browser look at the content of pages you visit and create a list of topics it thinks you are interested in, and then on demand can hand a subset of that list to websites looking to display targeted ads. If you turn it off, it just sends an empty list, which is also what happens when it's a fresh install

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[WaffleMonster]

If Google did it they would be investigated by regulators for attacking their rival's advertising businesses.

If the claim is Google can't produce a product that respects users privacy even if they wanted to that's all the more reason to stop using Chrome.

I don't know what you have heard but this has nothing to do with auctions.

I've been reading their own documentation.
https://developer.chrome.com/e... [chrome.com]

There is also a revised ping mechanism. Basically when someone clicks on an ad, a ping is sent to a server to count that click. Rather than send the ping immediately, which makes it easy to correlate with an identity, it delays the ping by a random amount, up to a few days. Apple developed a similar system for Safari.

Or you can just switch to a browser that respects user instead of adding features to make ownage of the masses worse than it already is.

GA Rollout?

[rossdee]

I couldn't see any mention of Georgia in TFS, so is this some other meaning of GA ?

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[ThurstonMoore]

General Audience?