The Privacy Sandbox was Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies with new browser features for showing and measuring ads. The plan has largely ended. Google kept third-party cookies in Chrome as a choice in settings, and in October 2025 it said it would retire most of the Privacy Sandbox ad features, including Topics, Protected Audience and the Attribution Reporting API, citing low adoption. A few privacy features from the project stay.
You do not need to turn anything on or off for Chrome to work normally. If you want to limit how ads are personalized, the settings that matter are Chrome’s Ad privacy settings and your third-party cookie setting, both covered below.
What the Privacy Sandbox was
Google announced the Privacy Sandbox in 2019. Google described its goal as new ways to strengthen online privacy while keeping an ad-supported internet. Instead of third-party cookies following people across sites, Chrome itself would help pick and measure ads. The main pieces were:
- Topics: Chrome noted a few broad interests from the sites you visit, and could share them with sites to pick ads. Google announced Topics in January 2022, and it replaced Google’s earlier FLoC proposal after trials of FLoC.
- Protected Audience: ran ad auctions on your device to choose ads from sites you had visited before (remarketing), designed so third parties could not track you across sites.
- Attribution Reporting: let advertisers measure when a purchase or other conversion could be credited to an ad.
What is being retired, and what stays
In its October 2025 update, Google listed these technologies to retire: Attribution Reporting (Chrome and Android), IP Protection, On-Device Personalization, Private Aggregation (including Shared Storage), Protected Audience (Chrome and Android), Protected App Signals, Related Website Sets, SelectURL, SDK Runtime and Topics (Chrome and Android). Google’s feature status page marks the Chrome ad features as “Deprecate and remove.”
Google said it will keep supporting:
- CHIPS, which improves cookie privacy and security.
- FedCM, which streamlines how you sign in to sites with an identity provider.
- Private State Tokens, which help sites fight fraud and abuse.
The status page also lists bounce tracking mitigations, storage partitioning, the Storage Access API and User-Agent reduction among the features that continue. These work in the background; there is nothing for you to set.
For ad measurement, Google said it will work on a shared Attribution standard with other browser makers through the W3C instead.
Your Ad privacy settings
Google’s help page Manage your ad privacy in Chrome describes three settings. To find them on a computer, open More (three dots) > Settings > Privacy and security > Ad privacy, or paste chrome://settings/adPrivacy into the address bar.
- Ad topics: topics of interest Chrome notes from your browsing. Google says Chrome shares up to 3 topics at a time and deletes topics older than 4 weeks. You can block single topics or whole categories.
- Site-suggested ads: sites can store ad suggestions with Chrome about things you may like. Google says Chrome deletes suggestions older than 30 days, and you can block a site.
- Ad measurement: sites share a limited amount of data to measure how ads perform, such as whether you made a purchase after visiting a site.
You can turn each one off at any time. Because Google is removing the features behind them, these settings may change or disappear in later versions of Chrome. Turning them off does not stop ads. Google notes that sites can still show you ads, but they may not interest you.
Third-party cookies
Third-party cookies did not go away. Google decided in April 2025 to keep offering the choice in Chrome’s settings, and Incognito windows block them by default. How to allow or block them on each device, and how the phase-out plan changed over the years, is on our page about Chrome’s third-party cookie changes.