Google says it will offer Android users some more privacy by limiting data collection

In a blog post, Google has announced a multi-year project called "Privacy Sandbox" that will make it more difficult for advertisers to track Android users across mobile apps.

Google has announced that it is planning to offer Android users more privacy by restricting tracking across apps on Android devices, similar to what Apple did last year. The Cupertino giant introduced a new privacy feature that lets iOS users opt-out of cross-site and cross-app tracking and targeting. Now, Google is promising to deliver something similar over the next two years.

In a blog post, the software giant has announced a multi-year project called "Privacy Sandbox" that will make it more difficult for advertisers to track Android users across other mobile apps. It will basically limit the data that is shared with third-party apps, so advertisers won’t be able to build a profile of users for targeted advertising purposes.

The new initiative is pretty similar to Apple's new privacy feature that the company introduced with iOS 14.5 in 2021. It is called App Tracking Transparency framework (ATT). It requires all the apps on an iPhone or iPad to request users to grant them permission for tracking them across other apps and websites. This privacy feature has shaken big companies like Facebook.

The social media giant’s parent company, Meta, recently revealed this privacy change has affected them in terms of revenue and that it would continue to lose more money as the feature prevents data collection of users, so they are not able to track them and serve ads. Facebook’s parent company expects that its ad business will likely be affected in 2022 too. It said that this privacy change would cost the company $10 billion in revenue this year. Other companies such as Twitter and YouTube were also affected by this move as their revenue also comes from targeted ads, as per a report by Financial Times.

However, Google's Privacy Sandbox is a little different from Apple’s privacy feature. It aims to limit tracking by default. Currently, Google allocates a special ID to each Android smartphone that lets advertisers build profiles of a user’s activity on their phones. They are then accordingly shown highly targeted ads. So, now you know when you search or shop for something online why you get ads for those products or services in some places.

With the new initiative, Google is basically testing new and better ways to serve advertisers as it wants to completely remove those IDs, the company said in a blog post. The company says that the project will “help limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID.”

Google also took a dig at Apple's ATT framework while announcing the Privacy Sandbox project. In a blog post, the company says that "blunt approaches are proving ineffective" and that "other platforms have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers."