Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025.

Google for the past few years has been trying to reinvent the software that delivers targeted ads online because the legacy approach, which relies on files called cookies that get used for ad tracking and measurement, denies privacy.

The Chocolate Factory refers to its suite of advertising application programming interfaces (APIs) as the Privacy Sandbox, though regulators and privacy advocates continue to raise doubts that the software lives up to its name.

Ad industry rivals, not so much concerned about the privacy aspect of the whole affair, worry that Google's reimagined tech stack will put them at a competitive disadvantage by denying them the data they use to make their ...