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
Victor Wong https://gizmodo.com/... Victor Wong / @vkw : I've spent the last several months connecting with people from across the industry on how we build a more private internet. Today, I published an open letter on 4 tenets that I believe we must strive for, and shared how these guide the Privacy Sandbox: https://privacysandbox.com/... Thomas Germain / @thomasgermain : Google is killing the cookie, and it could transform the digital economy. At lot of people aren't happy about, but Google thinks they should be. I talked to Google's @vkw, who gave me for an unprecedented look at the project they call “Privacy Sandbox” https://gizmodo.com/... Thanks: @thomasgermain See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Victor Wong's interview lands mid-campaign: he has just published an open letter laying out four tenets meant to frame Privacy Sandbox not as an ad product but as a set of principles for a more private internet. The framing work matters because Google's own history here is contested — current and former employees have described a long internal tug-of-war between user privacy and the ad business that funds the company.
The counterargument is already on record: Benedict Evans has argued that many [[a:970155|privacy proposals directly conflict with competition goals because they entrench large platforms]] — which is precisely the criticism aimed at a browser owner designing its own cookie replacement. And when Google began restricting cookies for 1% of Chrome users, marketers, adtech firms, and publishers said the market had not been prepared, suggesting Wong's persuasion effort is running ahead of industry readiness.
First-order effects
- Google gains the pen: by publishing tenets before shipping replacements, it sets the vocabulary of the debate, while advertisers, adtech intermediaries, and publishers must rebuild targeting and measurement around APIs only the Chrome owner defines.
- Apple's ATT becomes the benchmark Wong is implicitly answering — Apple has already shown that cutting cross-site tracking shifts budget toward walled-garden inventory, and Google is arguing its approach avoids the same disruption.
Second-order effects
- Adtech vendors and publishers whose businesses run on third-party identifiers face forced migration costs with no migration runway they control, pushing them to lobby regulators and consolidate around whoever holds first-party data at scale — mostly the largest platforms.
- Safari's earlier hard line — deleting site storage like Indexed DB after seven days of inactivity — shows browser-level privacy defaults are spreading beyond cookies, meaning publishers cannot simply wait out one policy change.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web identity moves from an open third-party ecosystem to platform-governed interfaces, concentrating pricing and measurement power in the handful of companies that own browsers and operating systems — the entrenchment dynamic Evans flagged.
- That concentration invites the collision the coverage anticipates: privacy mandates from regulators meeting antitrust scrutiny over whether the same companies that removed the old system also control its replacement.
The trend: Web advertising is migrating from open third-party identifiers to platform-defined privacy APIs, transferring governance of audience data from the open market to browser and OS owners.