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Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by vivekraghunatha on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @12:24PM (#30362738)
Founder of @Neeva here. In my experience, this is mostly PR that will go nowhere -- these are efforts that are not structurally set up to succeed given the internal constraints at Google. The Chrome sandbox efforts have been going on for 3-4 years with no progress.

The mobile app ads businesses (UAC campaigns) at Google are just too profitable, and depend too much on IDFA/ADID tracking for the Android team to be able to do anything meaningful here. So we all know the stakes here, and to put this abstract "tracking" into "real world" perspective, a big use case of ADID/IDFA tracking is gaming advertisers identifying "whales" (kids/adults who spend a shit ton of money on their games) and accurately targeting them across all their usage on the phone. If your kids are being tricked into spending hundreds of dollars by these ads, this is why.

Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by jefftk on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @02:51PM (#30364825)
> The Chrome sandbox efforts have been going on for 3-4 years with no progress.

There has been progress: many APIs have been implemented in Chrome, with several origin trials for testing them and iterating. Ex: FLoC started an origin trial, people raised issues, Chrome proposed a replacement (Topics) which looks like it will be in origin trials soon (https://privacysandbox.com/open-web/#the-privacy-sandbox-tim...).

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by jcranberry on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @04:01PM (#30365628)
Do you think there's any plans for this to replace the current API/advertising ID system?
Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by Crash0v3rid3 on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @01:06PM (#30363389)
> Founder of @Neeva here. In my experience, this is mostly PR that will go nowhere

Let's be honest here, this post is clearly your own PR for Neeva.

Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by vivekraghunatha on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @02:51PM (#30364819)
For sure, there's a bit of that. You would still agree w/ the point I'm making?
Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android by freediver on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @01:19PM (#30363566)
Thanks for providing your insights. It is a pretty strong comment against your former employer and presumably former colleagues. Were you not a part of the same spiel, building these very systems for years including those tricking kids into spending hundreds of dollars with ads, presumably with the same passion as you have now?

Working at a corporation as big as Google and at a high position as you had must have left a mark. I am curious what changed for you and how do you look at your friends and colleagues that are still working in Google today?