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Google can’t quit third-party cookies—delays shut down for a third time

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This post was written in Firefox —

Google says UK regulator testing means the advertising tech will last until 2025.

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Extreme close-up photograph of finger above Chrome icon on smartphone.

Will Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, ever kill third-party cookies? Apple and Mozilla both killed off the user-tracking technology in 2020. Google, the world’s largest advertising company, originally said it wouldn’t kill third-party cookies until 2022. Then in 2021, it delayed the change until 2023. In 2022, it delayed everything again, until 2024. It’s 2024 now, and guess what? Another delay. Now Google says it won’t turn off third-party cookies until 2025, five years after the competition.

A new blog post cites UK regulations as the reason for the delay, saying, “We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem.” The post comes as part of the quarterly reports the company is producing with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Interestingly, the UK’s CMA isn’t concerned about user privacy but instead is worried about other web advertisers that compete with Google. The UK wants to make sure that Google isn’t making changes to Chrome to prop up its advertising business at the expense of competitors. While other browser vendors shut down third-party cookies without a second thought, Google said it wouldn’t turn off the user-tracking feature until it built an alternative advertising feature directly into Chrome, so it can track user interests to serve them relevant ads. The new advertising system, called the Topics API and “Privacy Sandbox,” launched in Chrome in 2023. Google AdSense is already compatible.

The UK is worried that Chrome’s new ad system might give Google’s ad division an unfair advantage. Google and the UK CMA are talking it out, and Google says it’s “critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence, including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June.” Google has a public testing suite for Chrome’s new ad system to allow for feedback. Given all the testing data that needs to be pored over, Google says, “We will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.” We’ll check back next year!

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Four years after Apple, Google will finally kill third-party cookies in 2024

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It’s all going to plan —

Google delayed long enough to secure its ad business with new tracking methods.

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Extreme close-up photograph of finger above Chrome icon on smartphone.

Chrome has finally announced plans to kill third-party cookies. It’s been almost four years since third-party cookies have been disabled in Firefox and Safari, but Google, one of the world’s largest ad companies, has been slow-rolling the death of the tracking cookie. Ad companies use third-party cookies to track users across the web, and that web activity is used to show users relevant ads. Now that Google’s alternative user-tracking ad system, the “Privacy Sandbox,” has launched in Chrome, it’s finally ready to do away with the previous form of ad tracking. The new timeline to kill third-party cookies is the second half of 2024.

Google’s blog post calls the rollout “Tracking Protection” and says the first tests will begin on January 4, where 1 percent of Chrome users will get the feature. By the second half of 2024, the rollout should hit everyone on desktop Chrome and Android (Chrome on iOS is just a reskinned Safari and is not applicable). The rollout comes with some new UI bits for Chrome, with Google saying, “If a site doesn’t work without third-party cookies and Chrome notices you’re having issues—like if you refresh a page multiple times—we’ll prompt you with an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that website from the eye icon on the right side of your address bar.” Since other browsers have been doing this for four years, it’s hard to imagine many web admins not being ready for it.

Chrome's new third-party cookies controls.

Enlarge / Chrome’s new third-party cookies controls.

Google

Google says the rollout is “subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.” Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox switch represents the world’s most popular browser (Google Chrome) integrating with the web’s biggest advertising platform (Google Ads) and shutting down alternative tracking methods used by competing ad companies. So, some regulators are naturally interested in the whole process.

Google says its choice to offer this privacy feature four years after its competitors is a “responsible approach” to phasing out third-party cookies. That responsibility seems to primarily be about responsibility to Google’s shareholders since turning off tracking cookies was previously seen as an attack on Google’s business model. Google’s position as the world’s biggest browser vendor allowed it to delay the death of tracking cookies long enough to create an alternative tracking system, which launched earlier this year in Chrome. With the ad business secured, it’s now acceptable to phase out cookies. So far, everything is going to plan.

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