Google keeps promising to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome but not actually doing it. The company vowed to deprecate cookies back in 2020, pushing the date back to 2023 and then 2024. We did get some traction earlier this year, when Google disabled cookies for one percent of Chrome users, but those efforts have stalled. Now, the company says it won’t happen until next year.
It’s easy to drag Google for this but it’s not entirely in the company’s hands. The tech giant is working closely with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to ensure that any tools it implements to replace the cookie’s tracking and measurement capabilities aren’t anti-competitive. These tools are known collectively as the Privacy Sandbox and Google says it has to wait until the CMA has had “sufficient time to review” results from industry tests that’ll be provided by the end of June.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox has stirred up some controversy in recent years.
