After six years of development, Google announced the suspension of its plans to eliminate third-party cookies from the Chrome browser, marking a significant retreat from the promises of the Privacy Sandbox project. The decision came under pressure from regulators and competitors in the digital advertising industry, who feared that the initiative would give Google a competitive advantage and threaten the interoperability of the online advertising ecosystem. As a result, Chrome will continue to allow third-party cookies, leaving unchanged the current situation in which users can be tracked across the web by multiple parties.

Privacy Sandbox, introduced in 2019, was designed to address regulatory privacy demands and replicate the tracking restrictions already adopted by competing browsers like Safari and Firefox, which have blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020. However, from the start, the program faced technical criticism and skepticism about its actual data protection capabilities, as well as opposition from tech industry rivals and UK antitrust authorities. These authorities questioned the tool's impact on competition and Google's growing concentration of data.

In 2024, Google had already softened the proposal by promising a choice screen allowing users to opt in to keeping third-party cookies — but now it has announced that even this option will not be implemented. According to an official statement, users will manage their preferences directly through Chrome's settings, with no new consent mechanism or more effective tracking limitations planned.

Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out that this decision makes Chrome less protective than its competitors, leaving billions of people exposed to digital surveillance. Google justified the retreat by citing changes in the regulatory landscape and advances in privacy-protection technologies, such as IP Protection — currently only planned for private browsing mode and with no release date set for general users. The future of Privacy Sandbox remains uncertain, and experts recommend using browsers that block trackers by default and installing dedicated privacy extensions for greater protection.

This post was translated and summarized from its original version using ChatGPT version 4o, with human review.

Source: The Register