We and many other industry players, including Mozilla, Apple’s WebKit, Brave, and the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG), a special working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, have criticized Topics as an underwhelming solution to the problem of unwanted tracking and profiling on the Web. Its first proposed replacement for third-party cookies, FLoC, faced huge backlash and did not stick, and last year, Google proposed Topics instead. Chrome has delayed killing the third-party cookies until it has a replacement. But Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, still has not done so. That’s why most browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Brave, and Tor, already block third-party cookies by default. Many rightfully see tracking based on third-party cookies as the most intrusive and privacy-unfriendly. They are called third-party cookies or “tracking cookies” because they allow advertisers to track you across different websites where they show their ads. Other cookies are the cookies that are created by websites other than the one you are on. Some cookies are created by the website you are on - they are called first-party cookies and help the website remember your preferences and login details. When you visit a website, it may send a small file or a tracking code to your browser. Here’s a quick reminder of what third-party cookies are, and what Chrome’s history with them has been so far: To help sites transition to the cookie-less world as smoothly as possible, in the last three months of 2023, Google will give developers “the ability… to simulate the Chrome third-party cookie deprecation for a configurable percentage of their users.” In other words, it will let developers choose a percentage of their users who will not get third-party cookies from Chrome so they can test how well they can target ads without them. We have written extensively about the Google Privacy Sandbox: for an overview of its key features, see our article (note that Google since renamed its FLEDGE API ‘Protected Audience’). This includes testing its key component, the Topics API, which is designed to replace third-party cookies as the primary tool for interest-based advertising in Chrome. Update: On July 18, 2023, Chrome began rolling out its new browser version, Chrome 115, which includes its new ad targeting technology, the Topics API, designed to replace cross-site tracking cookies, to all Windows, Mac and Linux users.Īfter repeatedly pushing back the timeline for phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome, Google appears to have finally settled on a date: In a recent blog post, Google announced that it will disable third-party cookies for up to 1% of browsers worldwide in the first quarter of 2024.īefore that, Google will give developers a chance to “meaningfully preview what it’s like to operate in a world without third-party cookies.” During this preview phase, which will begin for all developers with the release of the next version of Chrome in July, they will be able to test various APIs that make up Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
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