Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to replace third-party cookies with a more privacy-conscious approach, allowing users to manage their interests and grouping them into cohorts based on similar browsing patterns.
That’s a major change for the online advertising industry, and after years of talking about it and releasing various experiments, it’s about to get real for the online advertising industry. Starting in early 2024, Google plans to migrate 1% of Chrome users to Privacy Sandbox and disable third-party cookies for them, the company announced today.
However, Google’s plan to completely deprecate third-party cookies in the second half of 2024 remains on track.
“If your site uses third-party cookies it’s time to take action as we approach their deprecation,” Rowan Merewood, Google’s Developer Relations for Privacy Sandbox wrote in a Chrome for Developers blog post.
“Our goal with the Privacy Sandbox is to reduce cross-site tracking while still enabling the functionality that keeps online content and services freely accessible by everyone. Deprecating and removing third-party cookies encapsulates the challenge, as they enable critical functionality across sign-in, fraud protection, advertising, and generally the ability to embed rich, third-party content in your sites—but at the same time they’re also the key enablers of cross-site tracking.”
The move coincides with the company’s ongoing work on the Privacy Sandbox, which replaces cookie controls and rolled out with Chrome 115 back in July 2023. The core tenets of the Privacy Sandbox include eliminating the sharing of cookie data between websites, and processing data on-device but away from apps and external servers, restricting their access to that data.
