Taking into consideration the need to provide ample time for the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to thoroughly analyse all information, and for itself to reconcile the divergent feedback it has received from the industry, developers and regulators on the ongoing challenges, Google has postponed the third-party cookie phaseout for the third time.
This time around, the tech giant has mentioned that it won’t complete its third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4, this year, as announced earlier, and therefore has extended the timeline to proceed and start deprecating them starting early next year.
In January 2020, Google had announced that it would begin sunsetting third-party cookies from its API starting mid 2023. But after receiving mixed feedback from advertisers at the time, it had postponed the move to late 2023 and began deprecating the same in January, this year, as part of its The Privacy Sandbox Initiative.
At the time, it also mentioned that being conducted in a phased manner 1% of the Chrome users will be impacted by its third-party cookie deprecation on January 4 and with the passage of time, the process will be ramped up to include 100% Chrome Users by the second half of 2024.
“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4,” the tech giant mentioned in an update on The Privacy Sandbox News.
“We remain committed to engaging closely with the CMA and ICO and we hope to conclude that process this year. Assuming we can reach an agreement, we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year,” it added.
Prior to Google, Safari and Firefox had also opted for and successfully phased out third-party cookies from their respective APIs, long time back.
