In March of the current year, Google began testing a new piece of web technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as part of its new initiative for the Privacy Sandbox. Google proposed FLoC as a replacement for third‑party cookies and regarded it as a win for privacy. However, privacy advocates and third‑party browsers have condemned FLoC, describing it as “a step in the wrong direction». Now, Google has released an updated timeline that details when it plans to roll out various new web technologies, including FLoC, as part of the Privacy Sandbox initiative.
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When Google announced its plan to kill cross-site cookies in 2020, it said the phased removal would take place within two years. However, according to the new schedule, this has been moved forward to 2023. Now Google reports that it aims to gradually eliminate third‑party cookies “for a period of three months, starting from mid‑2023 and ending at the end of 2023.”
The timeline of Google's privacy sandbox consists of the following components:
Combating unwanted messages and fraud on the web – [Testing phase]
Show relevant content and ads [Discussion phase]
Digital Advertising Measurement [Discussion Phase]
- Core Attribution API
- Attribution Reporting API with aggregated reports
- Cross-environment performance API
- Aggregation service report
Strengthening privacy boundaries between websites [Discussion phase]
- First-Party Sets API
- Shared Storage API
- CHIPS API
- Storage Partitioning
- Fenced Frames API
- Network State Partitioning
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All proposals will go through five stages: Discussion, Testing, Ready for adoption, Transition Period: Stage 1 and Transition Period: Stage 2. The APIs being publicly tested in Chrome are marked as “origin trials” (OT) and can be monitored on the Chrome origin trial registration page. Most of the proposals mentioned above are currently in the discussion phase – only the Trust Tokens API has reached the testing phase.
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Google reports that the transition period will not start until all the above APIs are ready for scalable adoption. The current schedule shows that all APIs must be “ready for adoption” by Q4 2022. However, Google says these are not specific dates and may change based on how testing is conducted and the feedback received from stakeholders.
Information source: xda-developers.com
