If you’ve ever wondered why the ad you saw for sunglasses on your phone suddenly appears again on your laptop, third-party cookies are likely the culprit. Now, after four years of false-starts and backpedaling, Google is finally making good on its promise to phase out pesky third-party cookies. Starting this week, some 30 million people, or around 1% of global Chrome browser users, will have the notoriously persistent trackers turned off by default. That could adversely affect advertisers’ ability to collect sensitive information about those users and to serve them ads for products that seem to ravenously follow them from site to site. Google’s eventual cookie phase-out could mark one of the single greatest disruptions to the online economy in memory.
Google’s limited cookies phase-out, which it’s calling a “Tracking Protection” test, is the first step in a massive plan to phase out the trackers for all Chrome users by the second half of 2024. The search giant wants to replace cookies, long a major point of concern for privacy advocates due to their invasives, with a series of more privacy preserving tools within its “Privacy Sandbox.” Google has held off on emptying the cookie jar for years due in large part to concerns for marketers and advertisers who feared a sudden switch away from the 30-year-old industry standard could gut their profitability. Ready or not, Google is moving forward.
“With the Privacy Sandbox, we’re taking a responsible approach to phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome,” Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox Anthony Chavez said in a blog post.
What are cookies anyway?
Cookies, which are small snippets of text sent to Chrome or other browsers from websites you’ve visited, are the primary trackers underpinning much of the modern internet. Every time you load a website, it will check to see if it’s previously left a cookie with you.
These trackers can help users stay logged…
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