Are you waiting for Google to finally remove third-party cookies from Chrome? We’ll have to wait another year

Google has again pushed back the deadline for disabling third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. The company initially planned to get rid of this practice of tracking users by 2022, after Apple and Mozilla did so in 2020. However, then the date was moved to 2023, and even later to 2024. Now representatives have announced a new delay – until 2025.

The reason for the delay was disagreements with the British regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The agency is concerned that the new system could create unfair advantages for Google’s advertising division over its competitors.

In the official blog, the company, explaining the reason for the delay, refers to “disagreements with the industry, regulators and developers.” This post is part of a quarterly report that Google regularly publishes to the CMA.

While the regulator reviews the results of industry testing of the new Privacy Sandbox and Topics API systems compatible with Google AdSense, Chrome will continue to use third-party cookies. The CMA said: “It is important that experts have sufficient time to analyze all the data, including test results from market participants, which they must provide by the end of June.”

Privacy Sandbox groups users by interests based on their browsing activity to deliver relevant ads. In this case, the data is processed directly on the devices, and the data is stored only for three weeks.