Google to whack third-party tracking cookies - but you'll have to wait until 2022

Google shifts position on tracking cookies and announces plans to tackle 'browser fingerprinting'

Google has backtracked on third-party tracking cookies and promised to eradicate them in its Chrome web browser - but users will have to wait until 2022 before the company gets round to it.

It represents an apparent shift in the position it articulated in August last year when Justin Schuh, director of Chrome Engineering, claimed that "blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers' primary means of funding, which jeopardizes the future of the vibrant web".

Blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers' primary means of funding

Schuh had suggested that the company's Privacy Sandbox initiative would help make "advertising even more relevant to people" but admitted that "some data practices don't match up to user expectations of privacy".

Ad and cookie blocking technologies undermine privacy, Schuh argued, because they encourage websites to resort to digital fingerprinting instead - identifying individual users via user-agent strings that convey the hardware a web surfer is using to websites. User-agent strings were introduced as a web standard in the mid-1990s in a bid to make it easier to deliver content that rendered correctly on a wide range of platforms.

But in a corporate announcement published yesterday, Schuh delivered an apparent about-turn. Privacy Sandbox, he claimed, would render third-party cookies redundant. As a result, "we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years," wrote Schuh.

Google aims to effectively replicate the functionality of tracking cookies with its Privacy Sandbox, which would enable advertisers to continue serving targeted ads. It claims that it will do so by grouping people via their interests, rather than their most recent browsing history.

We're developing techniques to detect and mitigate covert tracking

Schuh continues to maintain that cookie and ad blocking only encourages fingerprinting, but added: "We're developing techniques to detect and mitigate covert tracking and workarounds by launching new anti-fingerprinting measures to discourage these kinds of deceptive and intrusive techniques."

These should be launched later this year, he continued. "We are working actively across the ecosystem so that browsers, publishers, developers, and advertisers have the opportunity to experiment with these new mechanisms, test whether they work well in various situations, and develop supporting implementations, including ad selection and measurement, denial of service (DoS) prevention, anti-spam/fraud, and federated authentication."

The result, he concluded, would be "a more trustworthy and sustainable web", but added that it would require community feedback.

The blog posting from Schuh comes as the browser wars shift terrain to privacy.

Google's change of direction follows-on from moves by Apple's Safari and Firefox to kill support for third-party tracking cookies by default, introduced in Firefox in a September 2019 update.

Moreover, Schuh's announcement comes just a day before Microsoft rolls out its latest version of the Edge browser, based on Chromium, but which has ‘tracking prevention' enabled by default.