Google decides not to kill third-party cookies after all

Targeted advertising on the modern web is made feasible by third-party cookies. Advertisers can follow your online activities across websites and collect information about your interests while maintaining your unique identity if you support them. It makes sense that they have long been a focus of privacy advocates given their influence and the degree of knowledge they can provide into human activity. Google announced back in 2020 that it intended to completely change Chrome's user privacy policies and phase out third-party cookies as we know them today. Since then, Google's projected timeline for the change has been slipping farther and further behind schedule. Today, the company officially gives up and acknowledges that third-party cookies will always exist.

Vice President Anthony Chavez states, "We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice," in a blog post update on Google's Privacy Sandbox. Rather than discontinuing third-party cookies, we would launch a new Chrome experience that enables users to make an informed decision that is applicable to all of their online browsing, and they would always be able to change that decision.

Google was never interested in simply banning online advertising (how else would it make billions of dollars?). Instead, the company was more concerned with striking a compromise that would protect end-user privacy while still providing advertisers with the means to effectively target their ads. We've seen several intriguing attempts in the years since this project began to evolve cookies to a privacy-enhanced form, such as Google's quick abandonment of the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) tracking system. Additionally, Google conducted an experiment earlier this year that appeared to be its biggest attempt to date at blocking third-party cookies by default. However, given the results we're learning today, it's unlikely that the exam went well.

If not the general deprecation of third-party cookies, what will come next? Although Google isn't saying much right now, this "informed choice" initiative may be about finer controls over who may see what information. IP-address anonymization for Incognito browsing is one upcoming update. For the record, you can disable third-party cookies at this time; however, it is not enabled by default and may interfere with the functionality of certain websites.

Google is facing increased regulatory scrutiny in international countries, and the UK's Competition and countries Authority (CMA) has been a driving force behind the decision to remove these cookies. Chavez says Google will continue to work with the CMA as it moves forward with this new goal, but we're wondering if its scaled-back efforts will be enough to satisfy authorities.