The Persistent Popup
Google is slowly phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome and replacing them with a new advertising framework called the “Privacy Sandbox” (which includes features like Ad Topics). As Google rolls this out, they push a massive, full-screen, unskippable overlay prompt to users upon launching the browser, demanding that they “Review” or “Turn on” the new Privacy Sandbox features. For IT administrators deploying Chrome across an enterprise, or for users who simply want to open their browser and immediately search the web without dismissing a corporate policy notice, this persistent prompt is highly intrusive.
Silencing the Sandbox Notice
To ensure a clean, immediate launch experience and disable the Privacy Sandbox prompt completely in Google Chrome, you must modify the browser’s hidden experimental flags or use command-line arguments.
Open a new tab in Google Chrome, type exactly chrome://flags into the address bar, and press Enter. In the search box at the top of the experiments page, type Privacy Sandbox. Look through the results for a flag specifically labelled Privacy Sandbox Settings 4 or a flag related to the Privacy Sandbox Enrollment Override. Click the dropdown menu next to the relevant flag and change it to Disabled. A blue Relaunch button will appear at the bottom right. Click it to restart the browser. Alternatively, if you launch Chrome from a shortcut on Windows, right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and add --disable-features=PrivacySandboxSettings4 to the very end of the Target field (outside the quotes, after a space). This forces the browser to permanently skip the onboarding prompt.