Home > News

Google Is Tossing Its Plan to Eliminate Third-Party Cookies

By Laura Tucker
Google Eliminating 3rd Party Cookies Featured

To the relief of many users, Google promised to stop tracking users in 2021, announcing instead, the Privacy Sandbox, which would track groups. To the dismay of many, Google has now gone back on its word, stating it will instead leave the choice up to users.

Google’s Privacy Sandbox

Privacy Sandbox is an initiative by Google to create web technologies that protect user privacy, while still allowing advertisers to target ads effectively.

The plan was to replace third-party cookies completely, with new tools that limit the amount of data shared about users, while still enabling personalized advertising. This approach focuses on tracking groups of users with similar interests rather than individuals, thereby enhancing privacy.

Google Third Party Cookies Privacy Sandbox
Image source: Unsplash

The primary components of the Privacy Sandbox include:

  • Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC): groups users into large clusters based on their browsing habits, allowing advertisers to target ads without needing to know individual user details.
  • Turtledove: enables ad auctions to occur within the browser itself, reducing the amount of data shared with advertisers.
  • Trust Tokens: allow websites to determine whether a user is legitimate without sharing personal data, helping to combat fraud and spam.
  • Conversion Measurement: helps advertisers measure the effectiveness of their ads without tracking individual users across the Web.
  • Privacy Budget: limits the amount of information that websites can collect about a user, helping to prevent fingerprinting techniques that track users without cookies.

Good to know: check out these web browsers with a focus on privacy.

Google Now Backing Away from Its Privacy Sandbox Commitment

Google’s Privacy Sandbox sounded great to many people. While they would still be identified as a group for advertisers, without third-party cookies, users’ personal information wasn’t as much at risk.

But now Google is changing course. It was announced in a blog post by Anthony Chavez, the VP of Privacy Sandbox, that the company received much feedback about the plan that helped it create solutions that “aim to support a competitive and thriving marketplace that works for publishers and advertisers, and encourage the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies.”

Google Third Party Cookies Chrome

But what does all that mean? Chavez further explained that testing with ad tech companies showed that Privacy Sandbox could make that plan a reality, and they believe it will slowly improve overall performance. Yet, they also realize the transition requires work and that the policy will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and others in online advertising.

This caused Google to update its approach. Instead of making Privacy Sandbox a blanket policy for all, Google’s updated approach allows for user choice. Google will allow Chrome users to choose options for themselves. However, the options were not laid out in the blog post.

Chavez did say they are discussing the new direction with regulators. Additionally, Google will continue to have Sandbox APIs as an option and said it’s important for developers to have alternatives that preserve privacy. There are plans, too, for Google to offer additional privacy controls in Chrome, including IP Protection.

Interestingly, the Google VP didn’t really mention anything about third-party cookies. But with Privacy Sandbox only an option, it seems eliminating third-party cookies completely is not going to happen. If you’re just tired of third-party cookies, learn how to disable them in Google Chrome and Firefox.

Image credit: Canva. Screenshot by Laura Tucker.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.