How to participate in the Privacy Sandbox initiative

The Privacy Sandbox initiative proposes a set of privacy-preserving APIs to support business models that fund the open web in the absence of tracking mechanisms like third-party cookies.

Chrome has invited all stakeholders in the web ecosystem to participate in the incubation, testing and refinement of these new privacy-preserving web technologies. This post explains how to get involved.

# Monitor overall progress

Chrome will continue to update the ecosystem on the overall progress of the Privacy Sandbox on the Chromium blog. (See updates from Aug 2019, Jan 2020, Oct 2020, Jan 2021.)

# Understand the proposals

You can learn more about Chrome's proposals for the Privacy Sandbox on web.dev, including direct links to the proposals on GitHub. Links to proposals offered by others in the web community can usually be found in the public resources of the W3C groups where those proposals are being discussed. For example, members of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group created a guide to advertising use cases and proposals.

# Early input and discussion

To participate in conversations with industry representatives, browser vendors and others—for example, to advocate for a particular use case or solution—you can join one or more of the W3C forums where privacy-preserving proposals are being shared and refined. Today most community discussion is happening in the Improving Web Advertising Business Group, the Privacy Community Group and the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.

[Learn more about W3C Business and Community Groups. However, you don't need to join a W3C forum to share input. You can also raise questions or share feedback by commenting directly on the proposals on GitHub, so that the author and other interested parties can respond and discuss.

# Experimentation and feedback

As proposed solutions move to the early build and test phase, developers are encouraged to experiment and provide feedback. For local testing in Chrome, developers can use feature flags (chrome://flags) to enable an experimental feature in their local browser. To test how new solutions work in live scenarios for real users and sites, developers can register to participate in Chrome origin trials. You can review the list of active Chrome origin trials and learn how origin trials work.

# Find out more

• Digging in to the Privacy Sandbox
• The Privacy Sandbox
• Progress update on the Privacy Sandbox initiative

Photo by Ian Williams on Unsplash