An interview with Victor Wong, Google's senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, about replacing third-party cookies, Apple's ATT, and more
To replace the cookie in Chrome and Android, Google has an offering for the world called “Privacy Sandbox.” Here's an exclusive peek into how it will work.
Context & Ripple Effects
Victor Wong's interview lands at a pivotal point in Google's cookie-replacement arc. Since committing to involve the UK's competition and privacy regulators in Privacy Sandbox's design in 2021 a regulator-inclusive development process and detailing Android's two-year transition with ad industry input a marked contrast to Apple's ATT, which shipped with little external input, Google has been positioning Privacy Sandbox as the consultative alternative to Apple's unilateral approach.
The interview matters because Wong is the product lead for the technology Google plans to force onto the open web — weeks later it announced migrating 1% of Chrome users to Privacy Sandbox with full third-party cookie deprecation targeted for H2 2024 the first concrete migration timeline.
First-order effects
- Adtech firms and advertisers get their most direct read yet on how Chrome and Android will replace cookie-based targeting, straight from the product director responsible for the APIs they must rebuild against.
- Google sharpens its competitive framing against Apple, whose ATT — covering an ecosystem where more than 800 million users visit the App Store weekly — becomes the explicit benchmark for what Google claims to do differently.
Second-order effects
- Ad industry participants gain a structured channel to shape the APIs during the transition, shifting design influence from Apple's closed model toward negotiated standards — while UK regulators use their formal seat to pressure the proposals' scope.
- Apple's ATT playbook becomes the reference point rivals must answer to: any platform replacing ad identifiers now faces the question of whether it consulted publishers, advertisers, and regulators or acted alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web and mobile advertising consolidates around platform-operated identity APIs controlled by Google and Apple, replacing an independent third-party cookie ecosystem with infrastructure owned by the two dominant OS and browser vendors.
- Google's regulator-supervised rollout sets a template for how platform-level ad changes get cleared — competition authorities becoming standing participants in ad-tech redesign rather than after-the-fact enforcers.
The trend: Browser and OS platforms are replacing the open third-party cookie ecosystem with first-party-controlled ad APIs, with Google's regulator-inclusive Privacy Sandbox process standing against Apple's unilateral ATT as the two competing models for how that shift happens.