As the digital landscape continues to evolve, so do the tools and technologies that shape it. Among the most significant changes on the horizon is the phaseout of third-party cookies. This transition marks a pivotal moment for digital advertising and user privacy, prompting developers and businesses to adapt and innovate.
This will limit how websites track users across the internet but also keep the features that make online content and services free for everyone. This is tricky because third-party cookies are both useful (helping sign in, preventing fraud, showing relevant ads, and letting websites embed cool things from other sites) and bad (because they enable that cross-site tracking we want to reduce). So, the challenge is finding new ways to do those good things without relying on third-party cookies.
What are the timelines?
On the timeline provided on privacysandbox.com, two notable milestones recorded in Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 pertain to Chrome-facilitated testing modes. This testing primarily targets organizations evaluating the Privacy Sandbox’s relevance and measurement APIs. However, within this testing framework, third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome Stable users are already disabled.
“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.”
Prepare for 3PCD
To help you prepare your site for running without third-party cookies, we’ve outlined the key steps below.
- Audit your third-party cookie usage.
- Test for breakage.
- For cross-site cookies which store data on a per site basis, like an embed, consider
Partitionedwith CHIPS. - For cross-site cookies across a small group of meaningfully linked sites, consider Related Website Sets.
- For other third-party cookie use cases, migrate to the relevant web APIs.
