Google has announced that it will not be deprecating third-party cookies, after all the back and forth over the last few years.
In a blog post on Monday, Anthony Chavez VP, Privacy Sandbox said, “We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”
The tech giant is in talks about the new way forward, with regulators and is set to engage with the industry as it rolls the updated approach out.
Chavez mentioned that while early testing from ad tech companies, including Google, has indicated that the Privacy Sandbox APIs have the potential to achieve the desired outcomes, Google recognises that this transition requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising. “We expect that overall performance using Privacy Sandbox APIs will improve over time as industry adoption increases,” he added.
As this moves forward, the tech giant also advised that it remains important for developers to have privacy-preserving alternatives. “We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility. We also intend to offer additional privacy controls, so we plan to introduce IP Protection into Chrome's Incognito mode,” the blog post further said.
This is not much of a shock to the industry, since over the years, marketers and advertisers had anyway grown sceptical about the cookie phaseout. Time and again exchange4media has learnt from the industry that “third party cookie phase is still a distant plan, definitely not happening in the near future”. Additionally, Forrester’s Marketing Survey 2024 also noted that 61% of B2C marketers said they do not believe that Google will deprecate the third-party cookie.
The UK’s antitrust regulator also has raised its share of concerns around Privacy Sandbox over time, highlighting how it is ‘anticompetitive’, consumer privacy disclosures are inadequate, topics can be used for fingerprinting were a few among other concerns.
