Google Pushes Back Demise of Third-Party Cookies to 2024

Everything You Need To Know In Less Than 50 Words

Advertisers have relied on Google third-party cookies to target prospective customers for decades. However, there are increasing calls for anti-tracking. Google recently delayed its third-party cookies initiative to the end of 2024, so they can design an alternative strategy that pleases regulators, users, and advertisers alike.

Tell Me More

If you’re wondering what third-party cookies are, we’ll share. Google and countless other sites have long used cookies to track users’ actions on their sites and across the internet to gain a better perspective on user interests, whether to gain a competitive edge or to personalize marketing efforts to them. Internet users have long expressed concerns about this tracking violating their privacy. 

This pushback from the public resulted in Google announcing that they would be doing away with third-party cookies on Google Chrome by the second half of 2023. Late last month, Google announced that it wouldn’t be doing away with its cookies tracking until the latter part of 2024. This delay came as welcome relief from advertisers that have used cookies to help them more effectively deploy cookies since the 1990s. 

Testing Strategies

Google has long been testing different strategies that would allow it to continue deploying targeted ads without harvesting users’ personally identifiable information to do so. Their Privacy Sandbox project, which rolled out in 2019 and involved testing on Android mobile devices, aimed to test the ad efficiency when users’ personal details weren’t readily available. 

While it’s unclear how that testing went, the delays in implementing their plans may indicate things aren’t going as planned. An initial announcement of the company’s plans to do away with Google third-party tracking in 2020 promised it would happen by 2022. Then, the date got pushed back to 2023. Now the planned eradication of third-party cookie tracking is 2024.

Google hinted at some of the factors causing the internet giant’s latest delayed rollout of its anti-tracking program when announcing its pushback to 2024. For one, Google has publicly dealt with government regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom, accusing them of anti-trust violations for silencing personal data about clients’ customers.

Recent Statements

When making their most recent statement about the delay, Google suggested that their developers were still refining their designs based on the input they have received from W3 regulators, publishers, developers, and marketers. They also took a jab at fellow tech companies who haven’t yet eliminated third-party cookies, including Adobe and Criteo. They noted that these companies need to re-assess their handling of third-party cookies as well.