Bowing to Regulatory Pressure, Google Abandons Plans to Kill Third-Party Cookies

After four years of delays, Google finally bowed to regulatory pressure and abandoned its plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome with its controversial Privacy Sandbox.

“We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content,” Google vice president Anthony Chavez writes in a new post. “We recognize this transition requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising. In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice.”

The new way forward, Google says, includes both third-party cookies and Privacy Sandbox. It will create a new experience in Chrome that lets customers choose between the two paths, and they can change the choice at any time in the future. Google claims that it will continue to improve the privacy and functionality of Privacy Sandbox, just as it will continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available to developers.

But this reads like a eulogy, and given the technology’s tumultuous history over several years, and recent regulatory attention in Europe, it’s reasonable to believe that Privacy Sandbox is dead.

Google started talking about Privacy Sandbox back in 2019. The goal for this technology was always a bit suspect, with Google balancing the privacy needs of its users with the tracking needs of the advertising partners that power its online empire. The initial implementation, based on something called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), was so lackluster that nearly every major Chromium-based browser maker announced plans to block it. And so Google shifted gears in 2021, coming up with a new implementation that was delayed at least once each subsequent year due to partner, industry, and regulatory concerns.

After announcing that its release was imminent in mid-2023, Google then delayed killing third-party cookies in Chrome three more times, most recently in April, after regulators from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised no fewer than 39 “concerns” about this effort.

Today, the vestiges of Privacy Sandbox can be seen in the “Enhanced ad privacy in Chrome” pop-up that all Chrome users have seen. If you click “Got it” to this screen, the three features that constitute Privacy Sandbox today—Ad topics, Site-suggested ads, and Ad measurement—are enabled. If you click Settings, you can toggle each on or off as you prefer. I always toggle them off. And I mean always: Google doesn’t sync these settings to your Google account, so I’m confronted by this screen each time I install and configure the browser.

I assume the “new experience” Google now describes will be based on this interface, if it ever happens. But Google says it is “discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out,” so perhaps nothing will change. It’s difficult to say. But it’s nice to know that regulatory attention had the intended effect: This is what antitrust is all about.

One final bit of good news is that those who use tracker blocking browser extensions in Chrome and in Chromium-based browsers no longer need to worry about any loss of functionality. Indeed, Privacy Badger, one of the tracker blockers I’ve long recommended, now blocks Privacy Sandbox because of this technology’s many failings. We’ve come full circle.