Protected Audience API

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, 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.

It’s been a year and a half since Google’s January 2020 announcement regarding the death of third-party cookies. Since then, an ambitious goal has been set up to have brand new privacy-preserving advertising technologies deployed for the developer community to start adopting in place of Google third-party cookies in 2022.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

We have previously presented what users will see in a cookieless future, what products will be displayed, and the end results—the visible consequences of the proposed changes to third-party cookies.

In this article, we would like to focus on what is happening behind the scenes.