So Google announced yesterday that it's pushing back the death of third-party cookies in Chrome again. Now the target is "late 2024" instead of the second half of 2023, which was already a delay from the original 2022 date they threw out back in 2020. If you're keeping count, that's two delays in two years for a change that was supposed to be simple.
I want to be annoyed about this and I am, a little, but mostly I'm just tired. I've been running ad networks and analytics scripts on this blog since 2011, through every privacy panic Google has thrown at the industry, and at this point the cookie thing feels like the boy who cried wolf except the wolf is Google's own product team. First it was FLoC, which they quietly killed off back in January after basically everyone (browser vendors, privacy researchers, ad tech companies, all at once, which almost never happens) said it was a bad idea. Then it got rebranded as the Topics API, which is still in origin trials and which, if I'm honest, I have not gone and dug through the spec for because I have a day job and also because I've learned not to get invested in Google's privacy roadmap until it actually ships.
The official reason for the delay is that the ad industry and regulators (specifically the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which has been watching this whole Privacy Sandbox thing like a hawk) need more runway to test replacement technology before Chrome just rips the cookie out from under everyone. That's a fair reason on its face. Chrome has something like two-thirds of the browser market, so when it changes how tracking works, it doesn't just affect Google, it reshapes the entire ad-supported web overnight. Safari and Firefox killed third-party cookies years ago and nobody organized a task force about it, but Safari and Firefox don't run the ad exchange that most of the industry depends on for revenue. That's the actual asymmetry here and it's the part that never gets said out loud in the press releases.
Here's my small, specific complaint, the one that has nothing to do with regulators or ad exchanges: I still have a cookie consent banner on this site because of an EU visitor rule that a plugin insists I need, and I have hated that banner since the day I installed it in 2018. It covers about a third of the screen on mobile until you tap "accept," it's ugly, and it exists entirely because of a different (and unrelated) piece of privacy regulation than the one Google is stalling on. None of what's happening with Chrome and third-party cookies is going to make that banner go away, because the consent requirement is about first-party data collection too, not just the tracking cookies Chrome is trying to phase out. So even in the best case, in some hypothetical 2024 where Google actually follows through, I'll probably still have that dumb banner. That's the kind of detail that gets lost when everyone's writing headlines like "Google Delays Cookie Ban."
What I do think is true is that nobody in the industry actually believes 2024 is real either. There's a pattern here now. Announce a kill date. Get pushback from an industry that built billion-dollar businesses on the old system. Push the date. Repeat. I'd put real money on there being at least one more delay before third-party cookies actually disappear from Chrome, and I say that as someone who has watched this exact dance happen with Flash, with NPAPI plugins, with basically every "we're deprecating this old ugly thing" announcement browser vendors have made over the past decade. The deprecation always takes twice as long as promised. Always.
None of this changes anything I do day to day, honestly. I run Google Analytics on here (yes, I know, I know) and a couple of small ad units that probably nobody's even clicking on, and none of that setup changes until the cookies actually stop working, not when Google says they will. I'll believe it when Chrome ships it, and given the track record so far, I'm not holding my breath for 2024 either.