The Privacy Sandbox Initiative will help make advertising more private
This happens all the time: You search up fishing poles on the web, then five minutes later, all of your social media accounts and web searches are filled with ads promoting fishing poles. This means that when you searched for the fishing poles, that search was logged and given to an advertising agency that then funneled those ads right to you. No one likes the thought of that. It causes a lot of people to be skeptical about how much data gets sent to different sites. Because of this, Google started developing Privacy Sandbox. There are a lot of Android apps on the Google Play Store, and they can easily steal your data for advertising purposes. Google plans for this to be a way of delivering ads without siphoning data from the users. The company refers to this as a multi-year initiative, so we won’t see much from it for a while. Right now, we know that it won’t involve just one plan or product. The Privacy Sandbox Initiative will involve multiple different plans that aim at changing how companies advertise. Google says that the current methods we use to advertise are just out-of-date. They use old technology that leads to our data being tracked from different companies. It plans on changing this within the next couple of years.
When will we see any change?
This process will definitely take some time to get going, but we should see something within 1-2 years. Google has already started getting things together, and it will work with developers along the way. The company has its initial proposals on the Android developer site, and developers can review them today. By the end of the year, Google will have a developer preview for developers to try out. We won’t really have much information to go on in the meantime. A beta-testing stage will follow, but that may not happen until sometime next year.
This could be huge
If this initiative takes off, it could revolutionize how our data is handled. Google has a large footprint on the internet, so any major changes it implements definitely reverberate. If Google improves the way that privacy is handled, it will more than likely have a positive effect on other companies. We don’t know much about what will happen, so only time will tell what the Privacy Sandbox Initiative will bring.
