Google has delayed a plan to implement its new Privacy Sandbox APIs and phase out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by a year.
This is the second time the Internet giant has pushed back the switchover since it unveiled the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019.
Initially, it planned to implement new APIs to allow for less intrusive tracking of user activity beginning this year.
But after scrutiny from the US Department of Justice and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, it delayed the implementation to mid-2023.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Chrome’s vice president of Privacy Sandbox said that current feedback showed that more time was needed to evaluate and test the new APIs before dropping third-party cookies.
It now intends to officially launch the Privacy Sandbox APIs by the third quarter of 2023.
To give markets enough time to transition to the new APIs, Google will only disable third-party cookies on Chrome in the second half of 2024.
Google also plans to roll out the Privacy Sandbox trial to millions of users worldwide by early August 2022. It will then be expanded to more people during the rest of the year and in 2023.
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The updated timeline for the rollout of Privacy Sandbox and the shutdown of third-party cookies on Chrome is shown below.
Google’s decision to kill third-party cookies has left marketers scrambling, as they have played an essential role in monetising the Internet.
Third-party cookies enable browsers to store data on user activity across multiple sites and can then be shared with advertisers like Facebook to serve targeted ads based on the user’s apparent interests.
However, the tool has become unpopular with Internet users, who lament that targeted advertising has resulted in an invasion of privacy.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox includes an API intended to replace the function of third-party cookies.
Previously called the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), it has since been superseded by the Topics API.
Topics will track users’ interests to determine a list of top five topics they are interested in for a particular week based on their browsing history.
These will be established by comparing known websites the user has visited to a list of roughly 350 topics.
Source: My Broadband
