Google on Wednesday announced plans to bring its Privacy Sandbox initiatives to Android in a bid to expand its privacy-focused, but also less disruptive, advertising technology beyond the desktop web.
To that end, the internet giant said it will work towards building solutions that prevent cross-app tracking à la Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, effectively limiting sharing of user data with third-parties as well as eliminating identifiers such as advertising IDs on mobile devices.
“The Privacy Sandbox on Android builds on our existing efforts on the web, providing a clear path forward to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk,” Anthony Chavez, vice president of product management for Android security and privacy, said.
Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is Google’s umbrella term for a set of technologies that will phase out third-party cookies and curb covert tracking, like fingerprinting, by reducing the amount of information sites can access in order to keep tabs on users’ online activities.
But unlike Apple’s ATT, which requires all apps to ask for users’ explicit consent before tracking them across other apps and websites, the new multi-year project aims to strike a balance by offering privacy-preserving ways to enable mobile advertising while simultaneously adopting restrictions to curtail tracking between different apps. Read more:https://bit.ly/3sPBTHN