Google's 'Ask me anything' on Privacy Sandbox was more about questions than answers

The company talked a lot about privacy at I/O and keynote attendees heard the phrase "private by design" repeated many times; a claim that merits scepticism bearing in mind the extraordinary amount of data collected by the tech giant and its insistence that it cannot get by without it. Google has one giant privacy policy to cover all its services and it is not negotiable: users are asked to agree, or not use the services.

That said, there is pressure to improve user privacy from several sources – some regulatory, some from competitors who use improved privacy as a selling point, and some from users who prefer not to be tracked and profiled by multiple companies as a result of their internet activity.

Big changes are on the way, not least the plan to phase out third-party cookies, widely used by advertisers for ad personalisation and measurement. Google has come up with a bunch of proposals collectively called Privacy Sandbox which aim to reshape the ways in which personal data is shared between websites.

It has also encountered resistance to many of the proposals, partly because of questions over whether specific proposals are desirable or harmful, and partly because of the suspicion that the company will protect its own interests ahead of those of other companies or users. Google is dominant in a number of areas, including search, the Chrome browser, maps, and the Android mobile operating system, which means it collects a ton of data as a first party in ways that others cannot match.

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