Google plans to drop Chrome support for tracking cookies by 2022

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Feeling the pressure from competing browser developers, Google on Tuesday laid out a plan to drop Chrome support of tracking cookies within two years.

The plan is laid out in a post titled "Building a more private Web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete." It articulates a shift from a stance Chrome developers took in August, when they warned that the blocking of support for third-party cookies-which allow advertisers to track people as they move from site to site-would encourage the use of an alternative tracking method. Known as browser fingerprinting, it collects small characteristics of a browser-for instance, installed fonts or plugins, screen size, and browser version-to uniquely identify the person using it. Unlike cookies, fingerprinting is harder to detect, and user profiles can't be easily deleted.

Instead, Google's August post unveiled the "privacy sandbox," a proposed set of open standards that would serve as an alternative to the blocking of third-party cookies. Privacy sandbox uses browser-based machine learning and other techniques to determine user interests and aggregate them with other users. Google-whose ad-driven revenue model strongly favors ads that target individuals' interests and demographics-said the proposed standard would allow advertisers to deliver more relevant ads without allowing them to track individual users.

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