By the end of 2024, Google plans to extend the block to all Chrome users—a timeline that has been repeatedly postponed in previous years.

Even while the Chrome update only impacts a small percentage of users at this point, it is a significant development for the internet. Since the early days of the internet, websites have been using cookies, which are little text files stored on computers and mobile devices. Despite increased efforts to protect user privacy online, getting rid of cookies has proven difficult. Based on 63% of all web usage, Chrome is the most popular browser, according to analytics company StatCounter.

Google moved more slowly than its competitors in the browser space. Prominent browsers like Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Brave started blocking cookies years ago, and Microsoft Edge provides the same functionality with a “strict” privacy setting. It was more careful not to jeopardize the internet advertising sector, which provides funding for numerous websites and sponsors. Concerned that Chrome’s disabling of third-party cookies might offer Google an unfair edge in its advertising business by allowing the corporation to analyze activity on its own websites without third-party cookies, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also intervened in 2021.

Cookies have many benign purposes, such as preserving your preferred language, guarding against fraud, or facilitating repeat visits to a website without requiring a new login. However, many of those uses are with first-party cookies rather than third-party cookies, which are sometimes placed by social networks with share buttons or advertisers who display adverts. Even worse things can occur than looking at a product elsewhere online and then seeing an advertisement for a specific pair of shoes on Amazon.

“In the worst cases, third-party cookies are used to track users around the web, building up a detailed profile of them that could include not only interests but also deeply personal information such as gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc.,”

Without cookies, some have turned to more nefarious and difficult-to-block tracking technology, such as fingerprinting, which recognizes specific features of your computer. Presently, Google and other companies are developing substitutes for at least some of the functions that cookies provided, like informing advertisers when their advertisements have been viewed. It has been challenging to find a way to support ads while maintaining privacy, but Google thinks it is feasible.

“As we work to make the web more private, we’ll provide businesses with tools to succeed online so that high quality content remains freely accessible — whether that’s news articles, videos, educational information, community sites or other forms of web content,” Chavez stated.

Google has been working on developing new methods to replace cookies from third parties. For instance, Topics is a programming interface that helps with targeted advertising without monitoring your activities on the website. However, Safari and Firefox do not support it, even after that is added to Chrome and other browsers like Edge that are built on its open-source Chromium basis.