Privacy Sandbox for Android 13 Devices

Google announced on Tuesday that it's officially rolling out Privacy Sandbox on Android in beta to eligible mobile devices running Android 13.

"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," the search and advertising giant said. "Apps that choose to participate in the Beta can use these APIs to show you relevant ads and measure their effectiveness."

Devices that have been selected for the Beta test will have a Privacy Sandbox section within Settings so as to allow users to control their participation as well as view and manage their top interests as determined by the Topics API to serve relevant ads.

The initial Topics taxonomy is set to include somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand topics, according to Google, and will be human-curated to exclude sensitive topics.

The Beta test is expected to start off with a "small percentage" of Android 13 devices and will gradually expand over time.

The Privacy Sandbox on Android is Google's answer to Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which requires app developers to seek users' explicit consent before tracking their online behavior across apps and websites through unique identifiers. It was introduced by Apple in iOS 14.5.

    Graphite The initial Topics taxonomy is set to include somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand topics, according to Google, and will be human-curated to exclude sensitive topics.

    Is this FLoC?

    "Cohort IDs can be used for tracking

    Although any given cohort is going to be relatively large (the exact size is still under discussion, but these groups will probably consist of thousands of users), that doesn’t mean that they cannot be used for tracking. Because only a few thousand people will share a given cohort ID, if trackers have any significant amount of additional information, they can narrow down the set of users very quickly. There are a number of possible ways this could happen:..."
    Privacy analysis of FLoC

    a month later
    a year later

    Chalko

    There's nothing new under the sun; what's old is new again.
    The Sun Microsystems Java applet model used the term "applet sandbox" way back in 1996.
    Google, the great innovators, eh...? ;-)