The Mountain View company will begin testing its new anti-tracking protection. Starting in January 2024, Chrome will begin restricting cross-site tracking to certain users before expanding this measure to everyone in the second half of the year.
It took Google almost four years to get there. In early 2020, the Mountain View company announced that it would stop using third-party cookies in its Chrome browser in 2022. Finally, it changed its roadmap and decided to extend the deadline until the end of the year. the year 2023. Officially, the aim was to give the various web players enough time to understand their Privacy Sandbox initiative, which will replace third-party cookies used for targeted advertising.
Four years of back and forth to end third-party cookies in Chrome
The series of all these technical changes has also undergone some twists and turns. Google originally envisioned being able to replace third-party cookies with a new advertising targeting system called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). It was not individual users who were targeted, but rather anonymous groups of several thousand users.
But this advertising targeting technology quickly caused fear among web browser publishers. For the majority of players, FLoC risked further exposing users' private information and facilitating fingerprinting. Faced with this outcry, Google eventually threw in the towel and abandoned FLoC. To replace this system, the company then developed a new technique, Topics, whose contours were clearer and which, above all, corrected the most important deficiencies criticized for FLoC.
Fifteen before the deadline, Google has kept its word and has just announced the implementation of this transition process that will ultimately remove all third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser.
Third-party cookies, an old story before the end of 2024
Starting January 4, 2024, Google will begin testing Tracking Protection, the first stage of its Privacy Sandbox initiative. This new feature, which will initially be available to 1% of Chrome users worldwide, aims to limit cross-site tracking by restricting websites' access to third-party cookies by default.
Google says that users who participate in the Tracking Protection test are randomly selected. If you're lucky enough to be one of them, a notification will appear in Chrome informing you of your choice, both on the Chrome desktop and on Chrome on Android.
© Google
All third-party cookies will then be restricted by default. However, it is possible that some websites will not function properly without these famous third-party cookies. If this is the case and, for example, you refresh a page several times in a row, Chrome will detect the problem and offer to temporarily reactivate third-party cookies so that you can view the requested page.
© Google
Finally, starting in the second half of 2024, Google will expand this new functionality of Chrome to all users to gradually remove all third-party cookies.
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Source: Google