Google’s original plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome this year has been pushed back to mid-2023.
The company needs more time to get stakeholders —including regulators and businesses— on board with the plan, which could upend the entire online ad industry.
“In order to do this, we need to move at a responsible pace,” Chrome privacy engineering directory Vinay Goel wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “This will 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.”
“This is important to avoid jeopardizing the business models of many web publishers which support freely available content,” he added.
Third-party cookies are a major way websites serve relevant ads to users. However, the same technology works by tracking user's activities from one site to the next, which can infringe on your privacy.
Other browsers including Firefox and Apple’s Safari already block third-party cookies to help stop the tracking. However, Chrome has a dominant presence in the browser space, with a 64 percent share of the market. Hence, Google’s decision to render third-party cookies “obsolete” by 2021 was bound to send shockwaves throughout the ad industry, and raise antitrust complaints.
The other issue with Google’s plan has been the company’s proposed replacement for third-party cookies. The tech giant has been testing a new approach called the “Privacy Sandbox," which can still track user activities on the internet, but only in a bulk manner.
According to Google, the system can still serve up relevant ads to consumers, but without profiling anyone’s internet habits individually. However, the approach comes with a catch: Google gets even more power over their online ad data flows at the expense of third-party businesses.
In response, the blog post from Goel notes Google plans on securing clearance from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority before embarking on the cookie-blocking plan.
“Subject to our engagement with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and in line with the commitments we have offered, Chrome could then phase out third-party cookies over a three month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in late 2023,” Goel added.
In the meantime, the company plans on gathering public input and rigorously testing each proposal in the Privacy Sandbox before readying them for potential adoption. “For Chrome, specifically, our goal is to have the key technologies deployed by late 2022 for the developer community to start adopting them,” Goel said.
“We believe that the Privacy Sandbox will provide the best privacy protections for everyone,” he added. “By ensuring that the ecosystem can support their businesses without tracking individuals across the web, we can all ensure that free access to content continues.”