With its self-imposed deadline for a cookieless future looming, Google is giving the ad industry its first chance to go hands-on with its replacement ad targeting methods, rolling out testing for Privacy Sandbox globally.

That includes Topics interest-based targeting, the FLEDGE remarketing and custom audience tool and new attribution APIs. The test also includes the settings and controls that allow users to see and manage interests associated with their browser.

In a blog post published Thursday, Vinay Goel, product director for Privacy Sandbox, said the tests can begin with the Canary version of Chrome today, with a limited number of Chrome Beta users being added soon and more users being added from there.

“We recognize that developers will need some time to use the APIs, validate the data flows and measure performance,” Goel said. “Once we’re confident that the APIs are working as designed, we’ll make them broadly available in Chrome, allowing more developers to integrate, evaluate and provide feedback as we continue to optimize them for their use cases.”

The Privacy Sandbox is a suite of new, more privacy- and regulatory-friendly standards for ad targeting, marked by ending support for cookies within the Chrome web browser. Google currently plans to phase out cookies in the second half of 2023. The company pushed back its deadline last summer in response to greater scrutiny from regulators in the EU.

In January, Google scrapped its plans for FLoC in response to numerous factors, ranging from that fact that programmers and even ad tech companies were able to link the supposedly privacy-safe targeting method to specific users during beta tests, to publishers and ad tech companies saying it would further Google’s already huge market power. FLoC was replaced with Topics – an interest-based targeting method based on recent Chrome web history – which many media buyers saw as sacrificing a measure of targeting effectiveness for greater user privacy.