Privacy Sandbox’s “phasing out” of third-party cookies has been delayed until the second half of 2024
It’s not clear if this is a good sign or a bad sign for Google, but today the company announced that it is delaying its plans (again) to kill cookies as part of the upcoming Privacy Sandbox changes. Under the newly revised schedule, an extension of the testing period will see Google phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome starting in the second half of 2024.
If you haven’t followed along with the now multi-year-long drama, the short version is that cookies as a technology objectively suck. They arguably infringe upon customer privacy, allowing third parties to track you from site to site, building a profile to better monetize ads — and, potentially, other unsavory uses. As the (at times, unwanted) gatekeeper to the internet for its role in both search, advertising, and browser technologies, Google’s been trying to kill them for a while. But its last attempt, FLoC, basically failed because privacy advocates and other companies didn’t believe it would actually do anything to augment user privacy compared to the cookies it was meant to replace.
The new timeline. Sorry, Google’s Privacy Sandbox timeline site doesn’t scale well, and I can’t get a better image of it than the one Google provides.
The company returned to the idea with its new and slightly different Privacy Sandbox, which uses a feature called Topics to group users into ad-targetable categories instead of FLoC’s “cohorts.” This gets technical, but the short version is that Topics should be slightly less identifiable, making it harder for third parties to abuse them in a way that can violate customer privacy while still allowing ads to be customized in a way that targets them to customers, increasing their value.
Privacy Sandbox and its topics seem to have a little more support from third-parties as well as regulatory agencies, though some privacy advocates still don’t like it. It remains to be seen if the cookie will truly die with Privacy Sandbox, but the APIs that power it are already being tested by developers, with ongoing testing set to expand through the rest of the year into 2023. That testing will be public, but users will have “the option to manage their participation,” though it’s not clear if that means it will be an opt-in or opt-out process.
Originally, Privacy Sandbox was supposed to kill cookies by this year, but Google’s already pushed its final planned enforcement date back once before, and now the company is further extending the still-nebulous death day into 2024. Maybe the wait can help Google come up with more ways to convince critics it’s a good idea — or maybe it will give them the to kill it, the same as FLoC. Time will tell.
