Google delays the phasing out of ad cookies on its Chrome browser till 2024
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., recently announced that it would postpone the process of gradually phasing out third-party tracking cookies on its Chrome browser until the end of 2024. The search engine giant initially described how discussions to prohibit these web trackers in 2020 were ongoing. However, it had previously declared in 2022 that it was halting work on the Federated Learning of Cohorts. These cookies were reportedly going to take the place of these ones.
Several tech behemoths, including Amazon.com Inc., Brave, and Vivaldi, have stated that they oppose FLoC. They claim that it merely prevents these third-party cookies from tracking users’ online behavior. The Federated Learning of Cohorts was designed to be a surveillance tool that would start grouping users into unidentified groupings that had similar attractions and then give this information about the users to advertising. In essence, this would be due to the users’ information being missing as a result of the creation of these groups.
Google then announced the introduction of the new “Topics” concept. This would primarily work by listing the user’s top five hobbies while they peruse the internet each week, including things like shopping and vacation. By doing this, the necessary information would appear to be somewhat condensed and transmitted to the interested marketers without any significant user-related information. Notably, this would only reveal to the parties the elements that people find appealing and important. They could access their Google Topics data locally, but after three weeks, it would be deleted automatically.
The business has been testing several techniques to replace these trackers in its browser for the past two years. Google currently anticipates that the Privacy Sandbox aim will introduce APIs sometime in the third quarter of 2023. Due to this, the search engine giant announced its plans to completely remove these cookies from Chrome, hopefully by the second quarter of 2024. Notably, the company was among the first to advocate removing third-party trackers from browsers like Chrome. With Firefox following suit, Apple Inc. has already removed support for these trackers from its Safari browser. It’s important to remember that the Brave browser has never worked with these third-party cookies, even though many other browsers have done the same thing.