Privacy Sandstorm

Research Portal on Web Security, Privacy, and Advertising Proposals

Privacy Sandstorm is a research portal that gathers resources about the Privacy Sandbox initiative from Google as well as other proposals related to web security, privacy, and online advertising. Our main objectives are to:

Give broader visibility to the findings from the research community in that space.
Coordinate multidisciplinary approaches to evaluate and improve these proposals.

This community-based effort was launched after the HotPETs 2024 talk ``The Need for a (Research) Sandstorm through the Privacy Sandbox’’ by Yohan Beugin and Patrick McDaniel.

Technical Report Slides Website GitHub Slack

News & Updates

January 2026: Google deprecated the Attribution Reporting, Private Aggregation, Protected Audience, RWS, Shared Storage, and Topics APIs in Chrome 144.

November 2025: We updated this research portal with several new resources and released a technical report.

October 2025: Google officially announced the deprecation of (most of) the Privacy Sandbox APIs.

June 2025: SoK: Advances and Open Problems in Web Tracking released with collaborators.

April 2025: Google retracted wanting to prompt Chrome users for third-party cookies choice.

Fall 2024: We added instrumentation and Topics classification to the HTTP Archive, and collaborated on the 2024 Web Almanac Cookies and Privacy chapters.

July 2024: Google announced reversing course on third-party cookies deprecation.

July 2024: We released the Privacy Sandstorm website and Slack workspace during this HotPETs 2024 talk.

Resources

Proposals & Research Findings

Check out the resources we aggregated about the Privacy Sandbox and other proposals, like the Topics API.

Datasets & Software

Refer to the list of different datasets and software we put together, something may be helpful to your own research!

Slack Workspace

Use this Slack invite to join us, please use your real name and state your affiliation (if any) on your profile.

Help us improve this website!

Did we miss a paper, tool, dataset, or do you have any suggestion? You can let us know by filing an issue or pull request or by contacting us, this research portal is meant to be a community-based effort!