Google Puts A Halt On Chrome's Third-party Blocking Plans

(RTTNews) - Google (GOOGL) has avoided "cookiepocalypse" for now, as the company has put its third-party blocking plans in the back-burner till 2023. While Apple's Safari and Firefox have already started implementing securing user data, Google's introduction to the game would've caused the advertisers much unrest. The tech giant posted about the recent developments through a blog on Thursday.

The blog opened by discussing the growing mistrust that people face due to their details being continuously shared with marketers online and how the company is updating and adjusting its 'Privacy Sandbox' to keep the privacy of the users intact while keeping the advertisers happy at the same time.

"We need to move at a responsible pace, allowing sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services," Chrome Engineering Director Vinay Goel.

According to Google, Federate Learning of Cohorts or FLoC is going to be the solution to privacy concerns for the users. FLoC attempts to blanket all the user information and search preferences under semi-anonymity and divides users into cohorts according to their preferences. Then, the advertisers can target different groups of people while not tracking the data of any individual user. However, most of the browsers, except Mozilla have announced their displeasure with the idea.

"Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2. Chrome also will offer the first iteration of new user controls in April and will expand on these controls in future releases, as more proposals reach the origin trial stage, and they receive more feedback from end-users and the industry," said David Temkin, Director of Product Management, Ads, Privacy and Trust at Google.

The post also negates any participation in building technology that will track third-party information in the background. "Keeping the internet open and accessible for everyone requires all of us to do more to protect privacy — and that means an end to not only third-party cookies but also any technology used for tracking individual people as they browse the web", it read.

According to Google, it will approach the work in two phases,. In the first phase, which will start in late 2022, the publishers and advertisers will have nine months to migrate their service and adapt to the changing systems. In the second phase starting mid-2023, "Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three-month period finishing in late 2023."

Google believes that moving too fast will leave the advertisers to take to track fingerprints to locate the users accurately, which will only cause more harm than good. Goel said in a statement, "Unlike cookies, users cannot clear their fingerprint, and therefore cannot control how their information is collected or used. We don't think that's a sustainable long-term investment."