Google Backtracks on Its Promise to Deprecate Third-Party Cookies 

Last week, Google announced that it no longer plans to stop supporting third-party cookies on its browser, Google Chrome. Cookies are small text files placed onto a user’s computer by a party other than the website the user chooses to visit. Third-party cookies follow users around the internet, remembering their previous activities and providing detailed information about the user’s browsing history to advertisers. Google is the only remaining major browser that supports third-party cookies—Apple’s Safari began to block third party cookies by default in 2017, and Mozilla’s Firefox did the same in 2019. 

Previously, Google promised that it would stop supporting cookies on Chrome, and the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative explored other ways to support surveillance advertising on Chrome that may have been more privacy protective and transparent than third-party cookies. Their proposals included FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) and Ad Topics. FLoC would have organized users into groups based on their browsing history and served ads to users based on their assigned group. To implement Ad Topics, Chrome would infer interest-based categories, called “topics,” by evaluating users’ browsing history. Users would be assigned a new topic associated with their most frequently visited websites each week, and then Chrome would share the user’s topics with websites the user visits, allowing the website to serve an ad related to one of the user’s topics.  

Google says that it will continue to support Privacy Sandbox APIs and plans to “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who worked with Google’s Privacy Sandbox team, criticized Google for their reversal on the plan to deprecate third-party cookies. In a recent blog post, W3C said, “The unfortunate climb-down will also have secondary effects, as it is likely to delay cross-browser work on effective alternatives to third-party cookies. We fear it will have an overall detrimental impact on the cause of improving privacy on the web.” 

EPIC has previously highlighted that Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals still posed privacy and discrimination risks to users, even though they may have provided more privacy protections and transparency than third-party cookies. EPIC has long advocated for consumer privacy, autonomy, and equity by pushing for greater legislative and regulatory protections for consumers from the harms caused by surveillance advertising tools, including third-party cookies. For example, EPIC has previously supported a ban on surveillance advertising and has urged the FTC to promulgate rules to protect consumers from harms caused by commercial surveillance.