[2607.00693] The Rise and Fall of Google's Privacy Sandbox

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arXiv:2607.00693 (cs)

[Submitted on 1 Jul 2026]

Title:The Rise and Fall of Google's Privacy Sandbox

Authors:Rachid Youssef Grib, Alberto Verna, Nikhil Jha, Martino Trevisan, Marco Mellia<br>View a PDF of the paper titled The Rise and Fall of Google's Privacy Sandbox, by Rachid Youssef Grib and 4 other authors

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Abstract:On October 17th, 2025, Google announced the retirement of most Privacy Sandbox APIs, concluding nearly five years of experimentation with its alternative to privacy-invasive data collection on the Web. Designed to balance privacy with advertising functionality and cross-site tracking, the initiative faced repeated redesigns and limited ecosystem support.

In this work, we present the first longitudinal, consent-aware measurement of the Privacy Sandbox's deployment across the Web. Using a custom call listener and weekly crawls of the top-10,000 websites, we monitor the usage of all major APIs in the months preceding their retirement. Adoption had already stagnated well before Google's announcement: most APIs were used by only a handful of actors, whose activity declined steadily throughout our study. Even the APIs that Google plans to maintain show no sign of growth. The sole exception is Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS). Overall, the demise of the Privacy Sandbox leaves unresolved the challenge of enabling privacy-preserving interest-based advertising.

Comments:<br>This work has been accepted for publication at ACM CCS 2026

Subjects:

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.00693 [cs.CR]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.00693v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.00693

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history<br>From: Alberto Verna [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Wed, 1 Jul 2026 09:43:46 UTC (12,009 KB)

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