Google some time ago announced the intention to depreciate third party cookies in Chrome, but their inital aggressive timeline has since then been updated. So what are the latest news?
When Google first launched the idea of removing cookies, it dropped as a bomb amongst industry stakeholders. Their first solution with FLoC was also thrown in the trash after pushback from regulators, publishers and marketers. The new privacy sandbox solution is currently being developed and apis are available for developers to test. The current estimates points at a cookie depreciation event in Q3 2024
This year Topics was introduced as a replacement to FloC and as a way to be able to serve relevant ads to website visitors without cookies. With the API the Chrome browser can identify your current top interests such as sports, travel or food. The topics will only be kept for a limited time and thereafter they will be deleted. Thus it aims to be as up to date as possible and reflect what you might be interested in at the moment. So when you visit a website the ad server will call the Topics API and receive a topic to be used to show the ad. Currently 5% of Chrome Stable traffic are being used for testing this tech. How well it will work for advertisers is still a question to be answered. The good thing for users is that they will not be tracked by cookies, but this of course put challenges to the current/historic way of measuring true effect for marketing activities.
