Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which aspires to provide privacy-preserving ad targeting and analytics, still isn’t sufficiently private. According to a draft report from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the technology leaves gaps that can be exploited to deny privacy and track people online.
That’s essentially the status quo today in an online ad ecosystem that exploits web cookies, cross-app identifiers, and browser fingerprinting to follow people on the internet and fling targeted ads at them. But Google’s Privacy Sandbox has been touted as a way “to make current tracking mechanisms obsolete, and block covert tracking techniques, like fingerprinting,” while still serving business marketing needs. So, if its privacy assurances aren’t credible, the project has no reason for being.
