Google has announced a “Privacy Sandbox” initiative to help protect users’ privacy online. The company says that the initiative will develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on internet. The search giant said it will work with the web community to develop new standards that advance privacy, while also supporting free access to content.
“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve started sharing our preliminary ideas for a ‘Privacy Sandbox’ — a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy,” Justin Schuh, Director, Chrome Engineering, said in a blog post.
Furthermore, Google will also continue to ensure that users are served with relevant Ads. However, websites and advertisers’ access to your data would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user info. “User data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only. Our goal is to create a set of standards that is more consistent with users’ expectations of privacy.”
“Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected. We think this subverts user choice and is wrong,” said Google. However, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web. “So we are doing something different. We want to find a solution that both really protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely accessible on the web,” Google said.
Separately, Google has revealed the official name of its next version of Android OS. It is called “Android 10”. In the last 10 years, the company has followed dessert naming convention for the Android releases. This year, in the subsequent alphabet progression, Google had codenamed the next version as the Android Q.
– With inputs from IANS
