Google has announced plans to remove the presence of third-party cookies from the Chrome web browser by 2022.
The company has revealed its desire to ‘re-architect the standards of the web’ by removing the tools that enable advertisers to track users across the world wide web.
In a post on the Chromium blog, the company said this is the next phase of its Privacy Sandbox scheme that will “fundamentally enhance privacy on the web,” while also supporting publishers.
Within the blog post, the company claimed it had gleaned confidence from initial chats with the web community, giving it hope there there is a way forward that both preserves user privacy, while also sustaining the ad-supported web.
The post reads: “Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years.”
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Google says it needs the “ecosystem to engage” on the proposals in order to make progress on those goals. Speaking to TechCrunch, Justin Schuh, the director for Chrome engineering said the plan is to “re-architect the standards of the web, to make it privacy-preserving by default.”
He added: “There’s been a lot of focus around third-party cookies, and that certainly is one of the tracking mechanisms, but that’s just a tracking mechanism and we’re calling it out because it’s the one that people are paying attention to.”
It’s not entirely clear how Google plans to achieve this while keeping the bread and butter of its business model – the web’s advertising community – happy, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.
“We are looking to build a more trustworthy and sustainable web together, and to do that we need your continued engagement,” Schuh wrote in the blog post on Tuesday. No third-party ad cookies? Consider us engaged, Justin.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.