What is Privacy Sandbox for Android in 90 seconds or less

Privacy Sandbox for Android is Google’s project to make the Android mobile operating system privacy-safe. It’s related to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, but executed very differently.

First off, it’s a plan to eliminate the Google Ad ID. That sounds bad for mobile marketers, because the GAID is exactly what marketers use to measure marketing, track installs, and retarget lapsed users.

But there’s good news.

Google is building Topics for targeting ads, Fledge for retargeting, Attribution Reporting for mobile ad campaign measurement, and SDK Runtime for additional privacy from potentially data-greedy adtech software.

Add it all up, and you have a fairly significant package of tools that provide more privacy and safety for people, while also giving the industry what it needs to show ads, target them appropriately, gather privacy-safe data on their effectiveness, and make decisions about future campaigns.

In Privacy Sandbox, granular user data stays on-device, while aggregated performance data is available for marketing intelligence. As Daniela Sawyer, Founder of FindPeopleFast, told me, “Google is attempting to balance the rising demands of privacy-conscious clients and regulators with the financial requirements of developers and advertisers.”

Google won’t deprecate the GAID until at least 2024, so there’s plenty of time to get ready. And Google is asking for industry input and feedback, so it’s likely the proposal will evolve and grow over the next few years.