Google’s effort to end support for the use of cookies for user tracking in its Chrome web browser won’t be moving forward as the company originally planned. This initiative, dubbed Privacy Sandbox, has had several delays since it was announced several years ago. This decision comes after taking feedback from stakeholders including regulators, ad tech companies, web developers and publishers.
Antony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, says that “instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.” However, this new strategy still needs to be reviewed by regulators before Google moves full speed ahead.
The company will continue to pour money into improving the Privacy Sandbox APIs with the hopes it can entice developers with a better experience than they get with cookies. Google says it will also be adding more privacy focused features such as IP Protection, which intends to protect a user’s IP address by using a two-hop privacy proxy that only provides coarse location information such as a user’s country. IP Protection will be available as an option in Chrome’s Incognito mode.
It was always going to be a difficult lift for Google to convince so many different groups for this move away from tracking cookies, especially with as much money is involved in online advertising. It certainly didn’t help that the company is well known for abandoning products and services as soon as it feels that it can get away with it.
All Google can do now is hope that users will buy into the idea of the Privacy Sandbox and switch to it, forcing developers and advertisers to move to it and abandon cookies.