We are now past the middle of 2022, which was significant as it would have meant we were a year out from Google’s outlined plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome.
Now the company has pushed out this timeline a full year, giving organisations until 2024 to sort out how they implement tracking on the browser. This is the second time a delay has been announced by Google, with it doing so in 2021 as some issues were cited by regulators in the UK and United States.
The reason for the delay this time around is to give organisations more time to test the APIs in Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
“Improving people’s privacy, while giving businesses the tools they need to succeed online, is vital to the future of the open web. That’s why we started the Privacy Sandbox initiative to collaborate with the ecosystem on developing privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other forms of cross-site tracking,” noted Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, in a blog post.
“Over the past several months, we’ve released trial versions of a number of new Privacy Sandbox APIs in Chrome for developers to test,” he added.
It means that end users will need to wait a further 12 months before they can start to browse on Chrome with a bit more privacy and hopefully less of a threat as regards tracking.
As we have already seen with Apple’s radical change in policy regarding tracking of users, this decision, while giving organisations and marketers more time, still means that there will be a significant shift in how they do business moving forward.
“By Q3 2023, we expect the Privacy Sandbox APIs to be launched and generally available in Chrome. As developers adopt these APIs, we now intend to begin phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024,” Chavez advised.
While the delay is unfortunate, it looks to be a necessary step in order to ensure better privacy for users down the line. With Apple and Google taking this stance, the other big tech players will need to come to the party too.
[Image – Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash]
