Kacper Polewiak

Cookies play an essential role in the modern internet. These small pieces of data stored in your web browser can do everything from saving login details to enhancing website performance to helping marketers show users products that they will love. However, not all cookies are made equal, and there are significant differences between first-party and third-party cookies.

It might have been delayed, but the end of third-party tracking cookies is coming at the beginning of 2025, and businesses can’t afford to keep pretending otherwise. The good news is that thanks to this delay, there is still a small window of opportunity for companies to prepare for the cookieless future by engaging with the Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox.

In this media review, you can find out more about the latest Google announcements concerning the 3rd-party cookie phase out being postponed until 2024 [Note: In April 2024, it was further postponed until early 2025] and the tests expansion for the Privacy Sandbox for the Web, the news connected with Google’s Origin Trials and Topics API, as well as the reboot to the EU’s digital rulebook by the European parliament—DSA and DMA.

This edition of the Cookieless Newsroom highlights intensifying regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech in Europe and growing momentum around privacy-preserving infrastructure in AdTech. Meanwhile, major platforms like Netflix and Spotify are building their own ad ecosystems to seize more control over monetization.

In this edition of the Cookieless Newsroom, we spotlight pivotal updates from Europe. The European Data Protection Supervisor clarifies that pseudonymized data remains non-personal if re-identification is unfeasible, while French and German regulators are poised to take decisive action against Apple’s anti-competitive practices under the DMA.

In this Media Review, we describe Google’s announcement on the Single Origin Trial, Google’s Header Bidding, considerations about FLEDGE, and Tim Cook’s call for a federal data privacy law.