Google announced that it will postpone his ambitious plan to remove tracking cookies from third parties in Chrome until the second half of 2024.
Google originally announced that plans to phase out support for third-party tracking cookies in Chrome within two years at the beginning of 2020, now about two and a half years ago (and a global pandemic). Regulatory pressure resulted in an earlier delay that pushed the window to 2023.
However, current development approach (if not the underlying technology, so far) of the new technology would have received the approval of the Markets and Competition Authority (ACM) from the UK so this could be the last time it's delayed.
Google's plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome it's a move that would change the way ads are targeted on websites. The company says it has worked with publishers, marketers and regulators on its third-party cookie replacement plan.
Currently, cookies are the main means they use merchants to track users' online activity and tailor advertisements accordingly. However, Google, the world leader in online advertising and developer of Chrome, the most widely used browser in the world, decided to do without it.
“The most consistent feedback we've received is the need for more time to evaluate and test what's new in Privacy Sandbox before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome. We now intend to begin phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024,” wrote Anthony Chavez, Vice President of Privacy Sandbox.
The company said comments showed that advertisers need more time to test the technology. This is the second time that Google has delayed the implementation of its cookie alternative called Privacy Sandbox, as regulatory pressures have slowed the deployment of the technology, but Google could get approval from regulators for the new launch date.
Also in an announcement of the tests of these new privacy-sensitive advertising tools, it was mentioned that they will be extended to more users in early August and will be extended during the rest of this year and until 2023.
In the last months, Google has released test versions of a series of new privacy tools. Sandbox APIs in Chrome for developers to test. These APIs include “Fledge” and “Topics” which the company says strike a balance between preserving privacy and pursuing the online ad economy that is critical to its business.
For those users who are on a beta version of Chrome, it is possible that they are already enabled. Furthermore, Google's decision to remove cookies echoes steps taken by Apple, which shook up the digital advertising market last year by limiting advertisers' access to user data on its iOS operating system.
However, at a time when the tech giants are under increasing antitrust scrutiny, some experts fear that Google's decision to remove cookies will strengthen its power in the digital advertising market, where it already plays a dominant role.
Privacy Sandbox aims to work with the ecosystem to develop privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other forms of cross-site tracking.
It proposes using an in-browser algorithm, Federated Learning Cohorts (FLoC), to analyze a user's activity and generate a "privacy-preserving" ID that can be used for targeting. Google claims that Privacy Sandbox is more anonymous than cookies, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has described it as "the opposite of privacy-preserving technology" and akin to "credit scoring behavior."
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