Chrome Delays the End of Third-Party Cookies to 2024

What Changed

A year after the first delay, Google pushed the date back again. On July 27, 2022, Anthony Chavez, Google's vice-president for the Privacy Sandbox, said Chrome would begin phasing out third-party cookies in the second half of 2024, instead of finishing in late 2023.^1,2

The reason Google gave was time to test. The most consistent feedback it had received, Chavez wrote, was that developers needed more time to evaluate and test the new technologies before cookies were turned off.^1,3 Google also linked the longer timeline to the commitments it had made to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) earlier that year, which aimed to make sure the replacements worked and that the industry had time to adopt them.¹ Those commitments gave the regulator a say over when cookies could go.

The post set out the next steps:

• From early August 2022, Privacy Sandbox trials would expand to millions of Chrome users worldwide, growing through the rest of 2022 and into 2023. Users would see a prompt letting them manage whether they took part.
• The Privacy Sandbox APIs would launch and be generally available in Chrome by the third quarter of 2023.
• The cookie phase-out would follow in the second half of 2024.¹

Google largely kept to the second step: the APIs shipped in Chrome between July and September 2023.

Why It Mattered

The second delay meant third-party cookies would last in Chrome until at least 2024, more than four years after Google first announced the plan. For advertisers it was another reprieve, and another year of not knowing when budgets, tools and reporting would need to change.

It also moved the Privacy Sandbox from proposals to tests with real users. Larger trials meant ad tech companies could start measuring how well the new APIs performed against cookies, the question that would decide whether the plan could go ahead. Google's next step was to turn cookies off for 1% of Chrome users in January 2024.