Google said late on Monday that it was ditching its long mooted plan to block tracking “cookies” on its Chrome browser after years of resistance from online publishers and questions from regulators.
Cookies are snippets of code that allow third-party companies to track Chrome users’ movements across the web. Information gleaned from them is used by third party publishers and websites to sell their own advertising.
They have been long decried by campaigners as an invasion of privacy and are tightly regulated in the EU and elsewhere, with users asked by websites to give permission to have them deployed.
In January 2020, Google announced its “Privacy Sandbox” project as a better approach that would no longer track users individually, but its implementation has been delayed several times.
Online publishers that widely deploy cookies argued that the project would increase Google’s dominance since the giant holds mountains of data on consumer behavior that will be denied to others.
Instead of doing away with third-party cookies, Google will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing,” Google vice president Anthony Chavez said in a blog post.
The proposal is subject to the approval by regulators, notably in Britain and the EU that had opened probes in the proposed new practice.
The search engine giant said it was not abandoning its “Privacy Sandbox” projects and would continue to make it available to third party websites.
If approved, “we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Google added.