You get into the car to begin driving to a hiking spot for a weekend getaway. Since you don't know exactly how to reach your destination, you need to rely on GPS for a bit of assistance.
In terms of navigation devices, you have two main options: your car's GPS driving system or a mapping app on your phone.
There are pros and cons to firing up either system. The main downside to the car's GPS is that it can only perform one task. If you were to apply this method of device usage to all areas of your life, you could find yourself lugging around a suitcase with all of your technological assistants: one just for music, one for reading books, one for navigation, etc. On the other hand, a device that is a "one-stop shop" for helping you accomplish all of your day's tasks must be able to handle a greater degree of complexity. With this complexity also comes greater vulnerabilities, and one way to manage this challenge is sandboxing.
Sandboxing
Think of the beach as being analogous to all of the tasks you want to accomplish on your laptop or your phone. Without any boundaries laid out in the sand, there is nothing to stop a wave from dismantling your sandcastle or the overzealous toddlers nearby from tossing their beach ball into your picnic spread. In the same way, without technological barriers, there is nothing to stop a bit of malicious code accidentally downloaded from a misleading website from infecting your entire device.
If you put a high enough barrier around your section of the beach, the crashing waves and the other beachgoers will not disrupt your experience. Similarly, the computer security concept of sandboxing ensures that, if malicious software impacts one computer process, it will be isolated.
TechTerms defines sandboxing as: "a software management strategy that isolates applications from critical system resources and other programs. It provides an extra layer of security that prevents malware or harmful applications from negatively affecting your system."
One place where you have encountered sandboxing, perhaps without noticing, is in the Google Chrome web browser. Chrome keeps each new tab that you open in its own "sandbox." This way, if something goes awry in one tab, it will not affect the rest of your computer.
Learn more about sandboxing from The Verge here.