“We now expect to begin phasing away 3rd-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024,” Google Privacy Sandbox vice president Anthony Chavez writes. Regulatory pressure prompted a prior delay, pushing the window into 2023, but its current development method (although not the underlying technology, so far) has permission from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), so this might be the final time it’s pushed back. The goal of the Privacy Sandbox program is to work with the ecosystem to provide privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other kinds of cross-site monitoring. Google has published trial versions of a number of new Privacy Sandbox APIs in Chrome for developers to explore over the last few months. Google has been working on this for years in response to rising customer privacy concerns. Businesses have traditionally depended on third-party cookies and data aggregators to monitor their consumers’ activity across various sites. However, this certainly came at the expense of client privacy. As a result, firms such as Google and Apple began to limit the usage of third-party cookies. Google’s first attempt to replace the third-party cookie with its own technology, called FLoC,
