Google plans to eliminate third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser. An updated schedule, published on Wednesday, confirms that testing begins in the first quarter of 2024.
A total of 1% of Chrome users will join the test, which disables third-party cookies in their browsers. Google plans to push the change to the entire Chrome population by the third quarter of 2024.
The main purpose of this type of cookies is tracking on today’s Internet. While it is up for debate whether the disabling will have a positive effect on tracking, it is clear that it does eliminate a widely used form of tracking.
Google, being an advertising company first and foremost, has already created a system that it believes is better for the privacy of Internet users. Called Privacy Sandbox, it integrates the tracking directly into the Chrome browser.
Chrome analyzes the browsing data and assigns the user to interests groups. Websites and web advertising companies may use the information to display targeted ads. There is also an option for websites to assign certain interests to users. The system runs in the local browser, which, Google believes, is reason enough to use the term privacy to describe it.
You can disable these ad systems in Chrome for desktop systems and on Android; check out the linked guides to find out how.
Disable third-party cookies in Chrome
Most Internet users have no benefit from keeping third-party cookies enabled in their browsers. Very few may use services that require third-party cookies for functionality. The vast majority of websites and services works fine without third-party cookies.
It is therefore a good idea to test disabling third-party cookies in the web browser. If you run into problems, you can still enable the feature again to resolve it, or create exceptions for these rare cases.
Here is how that is done in Chrome:
- Load this page in Chrome’s address bar: chrome://settings/cookies. It opens the Cookies and other site data preferences.
- Select “block third-party cookies” under general. Chrome displays information about this when the option is set.
It states:
Sites can use cookies to improve your browsing experience, for example, to keep you signed in or to remember items in your shopping cart
Sites can’t use your cookies to see your browsing activity across different sites, for example, to personalize ads. Features on some sites may not work.
This is all that is required to block the use of cookies for tracking across different sites. Note that the change does not affect first-party cookies, which remain supported. These serve an important purpose, as they are often used to keep user’s signed in among other things.
All major browsers support options to turn off cookies entirely or only third-party ones. Most Internet users may want to block these cookies or configure their browsers to delete them regularly to limit tracking. Firefox users may want to check out this cookie banners article, as it explains how to do so in the browser.
Closing Words
Google’s crusade against cookies is self-preserving. The company makes most of its money from advertising and a lot of that money relies on tracking. The euphemistically called Privacy Sandbox is a continuation of that, albeit under different conditions.
The main danger of Privacy Sandbox is not that it continues to track users using a different system, but that it is an advertising system that is now integrated into a web browser. Google controls this web browser and also the open source core Chromium. Several developers of Chromium-based browsers announced that they won’t go along with Google, which is good for users of these browsers.
Problem is, Chrome has a commanding usage share and that means that the majority of Internet users will be enrolled automatically into the new system.
Now You: how do you handle third-party cookies on your devices?
The system (Privacy Sandbox) runs in the local browser, yet websites and web advertising companies may use the information.
Google believes this is reason enough to use the term privacy to describe it.
What the heck is this intellectual double-cross? What privacy if information regarding my digital life is accessible by anyone else than myself? Google’s brain storming to play with upside-down logic regarding concepts to perpetuate tracking advertisement is pathetic.
Vivaldi denounced the Privacy Sandbox in 2022:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/heads-up-googles-going-off-topics-again/
That’s their founder and CEO writing the above blog post, which, in small part, he says “Instead of arguing endlessly about whether profiling can be made acceptable (it can’t), we would much rather start with a return to context-based advertising and then fine-tune that, if (as Google claims) there are indeed cases where it doesn’t work.”
In 2023, a Vivaldi employee posted this to their official blog:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/alert-no-google-topics-in-vivaldi/
In it, they say (Among other things) that:
“Google’s Topics API will not be enabled in Vivaldi, and it cannot work in Vivaldi. It would need two things to make it work, and we have disabled both of them.
“It would need a setting enabled for it to collect local profiles about you. We disable the setting by default, and we forcibly do it in a way that means that changes to Chromium cannot remotely enable it. We do not provide any settings UI to allow you to change it, and we will soon remove the new Chromium settings section for it. (Technically, you could enable it by editing your settings or installing an extension that manipulates it. However, all that would do is enable local data collection. It will not be used because of #2)
“Before exposing the Topics API information to websites, Chromium checks if the setting is enabled or disabled. We forcibly make it always return ‘disabled’, even if it is enabled. So that even if you somehow manage to bypass #1 and enable local profile collection, it will not expose it to Google or other websites.”
Vivaldi also denounced FLoC.
I think Vivaldi is as good as it gets in the current computer web browsing landscape. I am a little worried that they haven’t announced a workaround to keep Manifest v2 extensions working after Google deprecates them, but I’ll give them as much time as I can to come up with something (Which will definitely be no later than the first time uBlock Origin and other extensions that don’t make the switch to v3 get disabled or disappeared and no sooner than when Google starts rolling it out to alpha and beta testers as the next version of Chromium) before I switch default browsers. Vivaldi is that good and that customizable- worth waiting to see if they can pull a rabbit out of their hat on this.
Frankly, if Vivaldi wasn’t forced to rely on Chromium, I think Manifest v3 would have been totally different in Vivaldi if they implemented it at all. Their dependence on Chromium and Chromium extensions may force their hand. Maybe they should have designed a Manifest v2 extension store that Vivaldi users could use side by side with the Chrome store instead of trying to build an in-browser email client. I’m just saying.
However, on this issue of Topics/Privacy Sandbox/Son of FLoC, Vivaldi has very publicly always said the right things on their blog. That’s an option for the Chromium-based browser to go to if you hate that stuff but want something based on Chromium.
On mobile, I prefer Iceraven, which is a more customizable Android-only fork of Firefox, and won’t be affected by the Chromium changeover.