Glossary
What is Privacy Sandbox?
Also called: Google Privacy Sandbox, Chrome Privacy Sandbox
Privacy Sandbox was Google's set of Chrome tools meant to replace third-party cookies for ads. Google retired most of it in October 2025.
हिंदी में पढ़ेंThe Privacy Sandbox was Google’s set of Chrome tools meant to support ads without third-party cookies. Topics guessed a reader’s interests inside the browser, and Protected Audience ran retargeting auctions on the device.
The plan changed. In July 2024 Google dropped its plan to deprecate third-party cookies and proposed user choice instead, and in April 2025 it said it would not roll out a standalone cookie prompt. On 17 October 2025 it retired most of the Sandbox, citing low adoption: Topics, Protected Audience, Attribution Reporting, Shared Storage and Related Website Sets, plus the Android versions, among others. Prebid.js 11 removed its Protected Audience (PAAPI) modules.
A few pieces survived. CHIPS, cookies partitioned per site, and FedCM, for sign-in buttons, continue, and Private State Tokens, for fighting fraud, are maintained. Attribution work moved to a W3C working group. Chrome keeps its current third-party cookie choice approach, so third-party cookies still work by default.
Example
An audit of a Prebid setup finds 12 modules, 2 of them tied to the Sandbox: a Topics module and the paapi module. Topics is retired in Chrome and paapi is gone in Prebid 11, so both can go, leaving 10 modules that still do real work.
Why it matters to publishers
Much ad tech advice from 2023 and 2024 assumed a cookieless Chrome that never came. Knowing what was retired helps you remove dead code and plan around what still works.