Google Postpones The End Of Ad Cookies In Chrome Until 2024

Google has been testing various methods of replacing third-party cookies in Chrome since 2020, and the APIs for the Privacy Sandbox initiative are now expected to launch in Q3 2023.
SIA Team
July 31, 2022

Google announced a postponement of the removal of third-party tracking cookies from Chrome until late 2024.

The company initially announced plans to block third-party trackers online by 2020, but earlier this year announced that development on the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which was meant to be a replacement for third-party trackers, would be discontinued.

FLoC was intended to be a tracking method that would divide users into anonymous groups with similar interests and then show this information to advertisers without using the user’s identity because they would be merged into groups.

Companies such as DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Vivaldi, and Brave spoke out against FLoC, claiming that it did not effectively prevent third-party tracking. Google then announced Topics, which would work by noting up to five user interests per week while they browsed the web, such as Fitness or Travel.

The data will then be condensed and shared with advertisers without any user data, displaying only users areas of interest to them. The user’s topics data will also be saved locally before being automatically deleted after three weeks.