Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

On June 24, 2021, Google announced that it will delay its plan to replace the use of third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser with new technologies. This delay comes amid antitrust and privacy concerns, as well as scrutiny from the advertising industry that the changes will strengthen Google’s own advertising business.

Google’s newly announced timing to phase out third-party cookies is late 2023, which is nearly two years later than its initial time frame of early 2022. According to Google, the delay will give publishers, advertisers and regulators more time to get comfortable with the new technologies it is developing to enable advertising after the cookies are phased out.

In explaining the rationale for the delay, Chrome’s director of privacy engineering, Vinay Goel, wrote that “by providing privacy-preserving technology, we as an industry can help ensure that cookies are not replaced with alternative forms of individual tracking, and discourage the rise of covert approaches like fingerprinting.”