After announcing its plan to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome, as a part of its ‘Privacy Sandbox initiative’, in the start of 2020, Google has now announced that it is delaying those plans until 2023. Tech giants says that “more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right and to develop a new technologies to replace third-party cookies for use in advertising.”
After other browsers like Safari and Firefox implemented some blocking against third-party tracking cookies across the web, Google announced a similar initiative called the ‘Privacy Sandbox’ for Chrome. This initiative was meant to end the use of third-party cookies and provide new privacy-first technologies to users.
Today in a blog post Google said as being the most-used desktop browser, this initiative for Chrome will need to be move at a responsible pace. And to “allow sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions, continued engagement with regulators, and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services.”
And to do so Google said Chrome will begin to “phase out third-party tracking cookies over a three-month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in late 2023.” This schedule is subject to approval from the UK’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority).
But before that tech giants hopes to work with the web community to create improved tools for ad delivery and wants to maintain user privacy and control at the same time.
Along with it also wants to launch the key technologies and tools by late 2022. Which also include its widely criticized proposal FLoC – “Federated Learning of Cohorts.”
The company had promised to provide “more detailed schedule” on its Privacy Sandbox website. However they have shared their current schedule divided into two-stage for third-party cookies in Chrome:
Stage 1 (Starting late-2022): Once testing is complete and APIs are launched in Chrome, we will announce the start of stage 1. During stage 1, publishers and the advertising industry will have time to migrate their services. We expect this stage to last for nine months, and we will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to stage 2.
Stage 2 (Starting mid-2023): Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period finishing in late 2023.