Privacy Sandbox
Google's initiative to replace third-party cookies with privacy-preserving APIs for advertising targeting and measurement.
What Privacy Sandbox means
Privacy Sandbox is Google's multi-year initiative to develop privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies for advertising use cases. Key components include Topics API (replacing interest-based tracking with a limited set of inferred topics), Protected Audience API (formerly FLEDGE, for remarketing without cross-site tracking), Attribution Reporting API (for conversion measurement with privacy protections), and various other APIs. Privacy Sandbox represents the most significant structural change to digital advertising since the introduction of programmatic buying. For compliance professionals, understanding Privacy Sandbox is essential because it reshapes how targeting, measurement, and attribution work — fundamentally altering what data is available and how it can be used. The timeline for third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome has shifted multiple times, but the direction toward privacy-preserving alternatives is clear.
Related terms
Cookie
A small text file stored in a user's browser by websites, used for tracking, personalization, and ad targeting.
Third-Party Data
Data collected by entities that have no direct relationship with the user, purchased or aggregated for advertising targeting.
First-Party Data
Data collected directly by an organization from its own customers and users through direct interactions.
Attribution
The process of determining which ads and touchpoints contributed to a conversion, used for optimizing ad spend allocation.