Photo: Kate S – shutterstock.com
It’s been a good two and a half years since Google announced that it would phase out support for third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser in 2022 and, as an alternative, one Privacy Sandbox to provide. After the date was pushed back to mid-2023 under pressure from UK and US regulators, it now looks like the exit will not happen until 2024 at the earliest – if at all.
in one blog post Anthony Chavez, Vice President of Google Privacy Sandbox, now writes that Google now intends to “phase out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024”. According to Chavez, over the past few months, Google has released test versions of a number of new privacy sandbox APIs in Chrome, refining the design proposals based on input from developers, publishers, marketers, and regulators on forums like the W3C.
“We have received consistent feedback that we need more time to evaluate and test the new privacy sandbox technologies before we eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome,” said the Google executive. This feedback is in line with Google’s commitment to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to ensure that the Privacy Sandbox provides effective, privacy-friendly technologies and that the industry has sufficient time to adopt these new solutions.
Photo: Google
Unlike, for example, the Safari provider Apple or Mozilla with Firefox, Google is active as an advertising marketer and can therefore not simply block out the competition’s cookies. In order to protect the privacy of users and at the same time continue to enable online advertising, Google is therefore testing with the Privacy Sandbox a set of new APIs that developers can support on their websites. According to Google, the aim of the initiative is:
fight spam and fraud on the web (trust tokens);
show relevant content and advertisements (Topics API, FloC API, Fledge);
measure the effectiveness of advertising (Attribution Reporting API);
strengthening cross-site privacy boundaries (Shared Storage API, CHIPS, Fenced Frames API…); such as
the restriction of secret tracking (same-site cookies, user-agent client hints, gnatcatcher…)
According to the current schedule, Google will expand the availability of the Privacy Sandbox to “millions of users worldwide” by early next month. The company then plans to gradually expand the test to more people over the course of 2022 and 2023 to break the privacy sandbox APIs to be able to officially introduce it in the third quarter of 2023. “This deliberate approach to replacing third-party cookies ensures the web can continue to thrive without relying on cross-site tracking identifiers or covert techniques like fingerprinting,” said Chavez.