Google Announces Plan to Disallow Third-Party Cookies in Chrome in Two Years ⇥ blog.chromium.org

Justin Schuh of Google:

After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years. But we cannot get there alone, and that’s why we need the ecosystem to engage on these proposals. We plan to start the first origin trials by the end of this year, starting with conversion measurement and following with personalization.

Google’s Privacy Sandbox plans still require the cooperation and support of the web’s standards bodies, which is why they are pretending to be hindered from making privacy-supportive changes. It probably is, ultimately, a privacy-friendly move, albeit undercut by suspicions that it will further entrench Google’s business.

That wouldn’t be true if the world’s most popular browser were not owned by a personalized advertising company. C’est la vie.