Google is rolling out the first beta for Android Privacy Sandbox

Google introduced Privacy Sandbox for Android in February of last year as a way to “raise the bar” for user privacy. After launching the Privacy Sandbox developer preview on Android in June, the company announced on Tuesday that the first beta release will be rolled out gradually to a select subset of Android 13 devices. Over time, other devices will receive the update as well.

With the beta, many of the APIs in the Android Privacy Sandbox, including Topics, FLEDGE, attribution reporting, and SDK Runtime, will be available for the selected app developers, as promised. 

Topics provides basic targeting without cross-app identifiers, FLEDGE enables remarketing without cross-app IDs, and the Attribution API is self-explanatory. These three are mobile app versions of the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. 

“The Privacy Sandbox Beta provides new APIs that are designed with privacy at the core, and don’t use identifiers that can track your activity across apps and websites. Apps that choose to participate in the Beta can use these APIs to show you relevant ads and measure their effectiveness,” Google said. 

Users who have been chosen to participate will receive a notification. They will have the option to not participate in the beta, but if they do, they will have access to a Privacy Sandbox area in their settings. They may then monitor, control, and modify the interests that apps use to target them with advertisements.

“Our goal with the Privacy Sandbox is to enhance user privacy while providing businesses with the tools to succeed online. Blunt approaches that don’t provide viable alternatives harm app developers, and they don’t work for user privacy either, leading to less private ways of tracking users like device fingerprinting. This is why we’re working with the Android ecosystem to build solutions that protect users and work for developers,” Google explained.