No more delays. Google is sticking with its plan to phase out third-party cookies from the Chrome browser starting in 2024.
The company’s software engineers on Monday provided a more detailed timeline for removing third-party cookies. Starting in Q1, Google will begin testing blocking third-party cookies by default for 1% of all Chrome users. In Q3, the company will kick off a “gradual phaseout” of the cookies, pending a consultation with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The company is eliminating third-party cookie support to address privacy concerns, which have long bedeviled the cookie technology. Other browsers, including Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari, already block third-party cookies, which can help companies track a user’s browser activity from site-to-site to serve relevant ads.
Google developed its own third-party cookie alternative, which it calls the “privacy sandbox.” It ditches the site-by-site tracking for on-device processing that can determine your areas of interest. The company then feeds the data to advertisers, which can in turn serve relevant ads without capturing your browsing history.
“Our goal on the Privacy Sandbox is to reduce cross-site tracking while still enabling the functionality that keeps online content and services freely accessible by everyone,” Google’s Chrome engineers wrote on Monday.
The tech giant originally announced its plan to phase out third-party cookies in January 2020. But the search giant has delayed it twice, partly because the UK’s CMA flagged Google’s privacy sandbox as potentially giving the company too much power over the online ad ecosystem. This could “undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market power,” it said.
In response, the tech giant has been working with the CMA to implement the privacy sandbox in a way that addresses antitrust challenges. In Monday’s update, Google Chrome engineer Johann Hofmann noted, “the gradual phaseout is subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns” of the CMA.
The other issue is that third-party cookie use remains widespread, even though Firefox and Safari have blocked them for years. “We currently estimate that a non-trivial number of sites are still relying on third-party cookies for some user-facing functionality,” which could result in site “breakage,” Hofmann said. Google has already been working on efforts to help website developers and companies prepare for the change.
“Despite all these efforts, we want to be clear that we are intentionally taking some risk here in the interest of user privacy,” Hofmann added.