In a push to provide safer advertisement techniques, Google announced the Privacy Sandbox feature for Android in February 2021. The feature is now rolling out to a few select Android 13 devices . The Privacy Sandbox allows for better ad techniques that mainly focus on user privacy. It will provide users and developers with some new ways to evaluate new solutions for the real world.
In a blog post, Google said, “Building on our web efforts, we’re developing solutions for digital advertising that limit user data sharing and don’t rely on cross-app identifiers.” Select Android 13 devices that are picking up the Privacy Sandbox Beta feature will get an Android notification for the same. According to Google, Privacy Sandbox Beta “provides new application programming interfaces (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 are participating in the Privacy Sandbox Beta can use the APIs to show relevant ads and measure their effectiveness. This will help Google estimate the kind of ads the user might be interested in, and the interests will be saved temporarily on the device. You will see the new Privacy Sandbox toggle to turn on or off the ‘ads privacy beta’ feature. It will be available on your Galaxy smartphone inside Settings » Security & Privacy » Privacy » Other Privacy Settings » Ads.
Users will be able to block interests, and they won’t be added unless you unblock them. Also, users will be able to block individual applications that use the Fledge API. Other apps will be able to see the saved interests and show you relevant advertising. This is a good middleground between seeing irrelevant ads and still maintaining your privacy.
