The Privacy Sandbox is a way Google has found to protect users’ personal information while collecting data to feed its targeted ad service. This Tuesday (14), big tech started to make the feature available in beta for some users who are running Android 13.
The feature features new APIs that developers can use to track audience activity and topics of interest across apps and websites without using identifiers, allowing them to show relevant ads on their platforms. This will occur without having access to the users’ personal information.
One of the Privacy Sandbox tools already discussed here at TechSmart is the Topics API, which generates profiles of interests so that companies from different fields can show personalized ads to users. Examples of “topics” listed by the API include “travel”, “automobiles”, “pop music”, “fitness”, among other subjects.
Topics are categories inferred based on the apps you use. Applications and advertising platforms may use them to decide which advertisements may be relevant to you. Topics are curated entirely on your device, so information about the apps you use is not shared with third parties.
Android 13 users will be able to access the Privacy Sandbox settings to customize interests generated by the Topics API. The path may vary by device manufacturer, but the options should be found in Settings, possibly under the “Privacy” section.
In addition, it will be possible to checkre block apps that are tracking your interests via the Fledge API, which displays ads based on audiences defined by the developers themselves. Other apps will be able to see the data stored on the device to also display targeted advertising.
Privacy Sandbox will be able to measure how effective an ad is. Advertisers will be able to temporarily store data on the device, but such information will be regularly deleted, according to Google, and can be removed manually whenever the tool is disabled in the settings.
The novelty “crawled” in limited tests on Google Chrome, but is finally coming to the world’s most used operating system as a way to mitigate the criticism and lawsuits filed against the US company for abusing the tracking of data from people who use it. your services.
