Google delays end of third-party cookies

Company will keep baking cookies till 2024

Google has pushed back its self-imposed deadline to stop using third party cookies in Chrome from 2023 to the end of 2024, 'in response to feedback from the industry'.

Google had originally intended to phase out third-party cookies in its browser by Q2 this year. However, it decided in June last year to extend the deadline to the end of 2023.

"The most consistent feedback we've received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome," Google's Anthony Chavez wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. Chavez is VP of Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to work with the industry to devise alternatives to third-party cookies while preserving user privacy.

"This feedback aligns with our commitment to the CMA to ensure that the Privacy Sandbox provides effective, privacy-preserving technologies and the industry has sufficient time to adopt these new solutions. This deliberate approach to transitioning from third-party cookies ensures that the web can continue to thrive, without relying on cross-site tracking identifiers or covert techniques like fingerprinting."

Chavez says Privacy Sandbox APIs are already available for testing. 'Millions' of consumers worldwide will be included in trials starting this August, where they will be able to give feedback as technologies develop.

The company anticipates that the Privacy Sandbox APIs will be generally available in Chrome by Q3 2023. It will then start gradually phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024.

Google originally announced its intent to remove tracking cookies in 2020, in response to criticism that they permit privacy breaches.

Advertisers use third-party cookies to collect user information from browsers, and then use the data to make advertising campaigns more effective.

Some browsers, like Firefox and Safari, have already introduced some measures to block third-party cookies.

For Google, however, achieving the goal of eliminating cookies has proven difficult.

Privacy advocates widely criticised the company's first proposal, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), calling it 'a wolf in sheep's clothing.'

The backlash forced Google to rethink its strategy.

In January, the company announced it would replace FLoC with a system called Topics, which would provide a mechanism to show ads based on broad interest categories, without collecting huge amounts of user data.

Chrome will determine which topics best represent a user's internet activity in a particular week, such as 'fitness', 'sports', and 'travel & transportation'. The browser will store information from the past three weeks, and delete older data.

The entire process is designed to take place on the user's device without involving any external servers, including Google servers.

Google intends to build user controls for the system into Chrome, allowing users to see the topics stored, remove any they don't like, or disable the feature completely.