Google Pushes Back Third-Party Cookie Blocking in Chrome to 2024
Google says it’s pushing back the timeline on phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome to the latter half of 2024, according to a company blog Wednesday.
The search engine giant said back in 2019 it wanted to improve the privacy of its browser by blocking these cookies, which are snippets of texts used by advertisers, publishers and data brokers to track activity and target ads to users. Google’s initial plan — part of its initiative called the “Privacy Sandbox” — was to block third-party cookies in 2020, but then pushed back the move to 2023. Today’s move pushed it back again to 2024 as the company says it needs more time for testing.
Google Chrome continues to be the most popular browser, but its rivals, such as Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Edge and Brave Software’s Brave, have done more to stop their users from being tracked.