\Trade visitors walk past the Google logo at the Google booth at Hannover Messe 2024.
Julian Stratenschulte | Image Alliance | Getty Images
After years of delay, Google said it will no longer remove and replace third-party cookies — a practice long used by advertisers — for its Chrome internet browser.
Cookies are small pieces of code that websites deliver to a visitor’s browser and save as that person visits other websites. This practice has fueled much of the digital advertising ecosystem, allowing users to be tracked across multiple sites for ad targeting.
In 2020, Google said it would End support for those cookies in early 2022 after figuring out how to address the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers and providing tools to make it easier to address the issue.
To do this, Google launched the “Privacy Sandbox” initiative to find solutions to protect user privacy and allow content to be freely accessible on the open web.
Google speak In January, the company said it was “extremely confident” about progress on its cookie replacement proposals, including “Group-Associated Learning,” which would essentially put people into groups based on similar browsing behavior, meaning only “group IDs” rather than individual user IDs would be used to target them.
But in June 2021, Google push back timeline, giving the digital advertising industry more time to come up with plans for more privacy-conscious targeted advertising. Then, in 2022, The company said Feedback suggests advertisers need more time to switch to Google’s alternative cookie as some object, saying it will significantly impact their businesses.
In one blog post On Monday, the company said it had received feedback from both advertisers and regulators, announcing its latest decision to scrap plans to remove third-party cookies in its browsers.
The company said through testing it realized this transition would require “significant effort from many stakeholders” and would impact publishers, advertisers and virtually anyone involved in online advertising.
“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we’re introducing a new experience in Chrome that allows people to make informed choices that apply across their entire browsing experience, and that they can adjust at any time,” Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, wrote. “We’re discussing this new path with regulators and will work with industry as we move forward.”
