Virtually everyone agrees third-party tracking cookies are a bad thing, but no one can agree on what to do about it. Google has offered up a few solutions — naturally, none of them involve ending user tracking. Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” won’t be ready as soon as the company hoped. Instead of phasing out third-party cookies this year, it’s pushed that deadline back to 2024.
The internet is largely free and open, allowing you to access content on innumerable websites hosted around the world. Instead of paying directly, most websites have ads (including this one). A cookie is simply a file deposited on your device by the website. First-party cookies can do useful things like retain your login info, save form fills, and so on. A third-party cookie, which comes from an entity other than the website you’re visiting, is almost always used to track you and target ads.
Google said in 2020 that it would block third-party cookies in Chrome within two years, but that’s not happening. That’s when it announced the nebulous Privacy Sandbox. Google is an advertising company first and foremost, so it can’t just do away with tracking technologies if it’s going to sell targeted ads. Its first solution, known as Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, was criticized for being insufficiently anonymous.
Google’s new angle is called Topics, which will consist of 300 different topics. Your online actions will determine which of those topics become associated with you. When you visit a website, the Privacy Sandbox will be able to provide it with three random topics from that list. Websites can pass that data to ad networks and target ads around those topics.
Google’s updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox.
Google announced the new delay under the heading of “Expanding testing for the Privacy Sandbox,” which is true. Google plans to expand the trial of its Topics model for ad targeting to millions of new users in the coming months. However, this test is going to stretch into 2023, and the final Privacy Sandbox API won’t be ready until Q3 2023. Chrome won’t end support for third-party cookies until the second half of 2024. That’s quite a bit later than initially promised.
In the meantime, you can activate the Do Not Track flag in your browser, which is supported in all the major players — even Google. However, Do Not Track is merely a polite suggestion. Most websites don’t respect that request. Browsers like Firefox and Edge have more robust tracking prevention that can make your online activity more private, but no method is foolproof.
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