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Google delays third-party cookie demise yet again 🔒
Source: Digiday
April 23rd, 2024
Summary: It's Google’s third delay in its effort to sunset cookies. Bowing to pressure from all sides, Google said yesterday that it won't be able to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome until early 2025 at the earliest, rather than the second half of 2024 as planned. There is no specific target timeframe for cookie deprecation in 2025 as of now. Google vaguely cited "ongoing challenges" in reconciling feedback on its Privacy Sandbox APIs, which are meant to replace third-party cookies. A big factor here is the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA), which has explicit authority to greenlight or halt the initiative based on if and when it feels comfortable that cookie deprecation won't hurt Google's competition. The CMA needs time to review results from industry testing of the Sandbox APIs (Google already deprecated third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users for testing purposes) and raised numerous concerns in January that would need to be addressed before Google could proceed with full deprecation.
Last week, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is UK's privacy regulator, warned in a draft report that the Privacy Sandbox has vulnerabilities that could be used to identify users. In February, the IAB Tech Lab released a lengthy report citing many shortcomings of the Privacy Sandbox APIs as a viable cookie replacement for the digital advertising ecosystem.
No one seems particularly happy with the Privacy Sandbox, so this news doesn’t come as a surprise.
Opinion: In August 2022, when the last cookie deprecation delay was announced, we wrote this in the U of Digital Newsletter:
While Google tries to play their cards right, the digital ad ecosystem is (once again) collateral damage. Another delay only serves to extend an addressability and privacy purgatory for the digital advertising industry, which is bad on many levels. Innovation will suffer, confusion will reign, and the industry will continue to be distracted from solving problems that are far more important. Right now, ad tech companies seem entirely focused on putting out "groundbreaking" identity solutions every day, with no end in sight, and there is no certainty that any of them will work or be sustainable in an uncertain future…
It’s almost like two years went by and … nothing changed!
To be clear, we don't believe Google is pushing out cookie deprecation because of any self-serving, malicious intent. They are at the mercy of the CMA and other industry stakeholders. We believe that Google is highly motivated to deprecate third-party cookies as soon as possible. If anything, it feels like the industry is doing this to itself, mostly out of fear.
We get it. It’s gonna be painful. It will likely benefit Google and other walled gardens while hurting open web ad tech. But at this point, it's inevitable. An extra six months won’t make things better, it’ll probably just make things worse. Time to get on with it…
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