Google Abandons Removing Third-Party Cookies from Chrome

What Changed

Google had announced the plan in January 2020 and delayed it three times, most recently in April 2024.¹ In July 2024 it changed course and proposed a different approach: an "informed choice" that would let people decide how they are tracked across their web browsing, and change that choice at any time.²

The UK Competition and Markets Authority, which had overseen the plan since 2022, said it would review the new approach.³ The UK's data protection regulator was less welcoming. The ICO said it had long held that blocking third-party cookies would be a positive step for consumers, and that it was disappointed Google had changed its plans. It called the new approach a significant change and encouraged the ad industry to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies instead of more opaque forms of tracking.⁴ Google later dropped the prompt as well, so the existing setting in Chrome's privacy controls stayed, with cookies on by default.

Why It Mattered

For four years the industry had prepared for the end of third-party cookies in the world's most-used browser. Chrome still accounts for about two-thirds of browsing worldwide, according to Statcounter (September 2026).⁵ The reversal meant Chrome would remain the one major browser where cross-site cookies work by default, while Safari and Firefox continue to block them.

It also left the Privacy Sandbox without its main reason to exist. Its APIs were designed to replace functions that third-party cookies would no longer perform. With cookies staying, few companies had a reason to adopt them, and Google retired most of them in October 2025.

The decision did not make third-party cookies reliable again. Consent requirements in Europe and elsewhere, ad blockers and other browsers still remove a large share of users from cookie-based tracking, and on iPhone even Chrome blocks them.