Android Privacy Sandbox posited as so-called better alternative for users

Google announced the Android Privacy Sandbox as a means of competing with iOS and their privacy features — including opt-in tracking and app privacy labels — but the Android version of privacy certainly appears not to be as protective.

The Privacy Sandbox on Android builds on our existing efforts on the web, providing a clear path forward to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk. Apple’s tracking changes blew up the advertising industry and are already costing ad-based companies like Facebook $10 billion in revenue for the year. Google, the world’s largest ad company, doesn’t seem to want to do that on Android.

“The Privacy Sandbox on Android builds on our existing efforts on the web, providing a clear path forward to improve user privacy without putting access to free content and services at risk,” claimed Google in a blogpost, however, it did not outline exactly how it thought Apple’s blocking of unique identifiers was a “worse outcome for user privacy.”

A report by Ars Techina showed that there was so far no evidence as to how this approach actually reduces tracking. For that, there’s the “SDK Runtime,” a sandbox for ad-related SDKs that Google says will “reduce undisclosed access and sharing of a user’s app data” for “compatible SDKs.” The idea is that developers could package a “runtime-enabled SDK” with limited permissions instead of a traditional ad SDK, which has all the same access as the main app.