Google Will Block Third-Party Cookies for All Chrome Users by the Second Half of 2024
Four years after Google announced Privacy Sandbox, the company will finally begin to test blocking third-party cookies on Chrome.
- Google finally set a date to begin testing to block Chrome third-party cookies in January 2024.
- The company said it would phase out third-party cookie tracking for all Chrome users by the second half of 2024.
Almost a year and a half after Google postponed its plans to phase out third-party cookies for the second time, this week, Google said it is rolling out the Tracking Protection feature in Chrome on January 4, 2024, to a limited number of users.
Google said it would begin testing Tracking Protection for 1% of Chrome users chosen randomly across the globe. Third-party cookies have already been deprecated from Chrome competitors Firefox (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and Safari (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) for four years.
Google Chrome is leading in the web browser market, commanding 62.85% of the global market share, followed by Safari at 20.04%, Edge at 5.5%, and Mozilla Firefox at 3.23%. Despite a delayed response to the global outcry for privacy-preserving methods, the company could hold on to its #1 position.
The search and advertising giant said it plans to phase out third-party cookies for all users of its popular browser, both desktop and mobile, in the second half of 2024, pending regulatory clearance from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
Google’s plan to do away with cross-site tracking and user surveillance by deprecating third-party cookies comes under the Privacy Sandbox initiative announced in 2019. It aims to instill privacy for users while ensuring advertisers aren’t affected.
Privacy Sandbox encompassed Topics API, designed to provide high-level interest signals to serve relevant content and ads, Protected Audience API (formerly FLEDGE API) to serve custom audience and remarketing and Attribution Reporting API for online ad performance measurement.
If users face any difficulties with the new Tracking Protection feature, such as finding it difficult to load websites, they would have the option to re-enable third-party cookies temporarily.
“If a site doesn’t work without third-party cookies and Chrome notices you’re having issues — like if you refresh a page multiple times — we’ll prompt you with an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that website from the eye icon on the right side of your address bar,” Google noted.
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