At least another two years will pass before Google’s preferred Privacy Sandbox set of substitutes take the place of intrusive cookies, fingerprinting, and other technology that tracks user information and activity across different websites for advertising. Early in 2020, when Google first announced its plan to gradually stop supporting third-party monitoring cookies in Chrome, that was about two and a half years (and one pandemic) ago.
Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google Privacy Sandbox, writes in a blog post that the company “now intends to begin phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024.” The window was previously delayed due to regulatory pressure, pushing it into 2023, but its current development strategy (if not the underlying technology, at least for now) has received permission from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), so this may be the final delay.
Google is actively exploring a new set of APIs—some of which you may be familiar with, like Fledge or Topics API—that it believes may strike a compromise between maintaining privacy and sustaining the online advertising economy, which is the foundation of its company. Now that developers can test the APIs on their websites and applications, it may already be enabled for you if you’re using a beta version of Chrome.
Read more about this at theverge.com
