Google scraps plans to replace cookies in Chrome with its own Privacy Sandbox.
The idea of phasing out third-party cookies in its browser and replacing them with another system has been floating around for six years and has taken various forms over that time.
Those plans have also been met with criticism, both from privacy activists and from competing advertising companies. Now, it seems that the Privacy Sandbox is officially over. Anthony Chaves, VP for the Privacy Sandbox project, says that the current support for cookies will continue.
Cookies and privacy
Cookies are small files that your browser keeps track of your behaviour on a website. This includes, for example, your login status or the links you have already clicked (which is why they are shown in a different colour).
Advertisers have also been using them for some time to track you across the web. These are mainly third-party cookies that are bad for your privacy. This is also a reason why browsers such as Chrome allow you to block them, and some browsers, such as Firefox, always do so by default.
However, Google is one of the world’s largest advertising companies and has been looking for a way to give advertisers the right behavioural information, but in a way that is more palatable from a privacy standpoint, since 2019.
This first led to the idea of FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which was heavily criticised for being hardly more privacy-friendly than cookies.