Google Chrome to kill third-party cookies within 2 years

Google today announced that it has a plan to make third-party cookies obsolete on Chrome. Google is creating a Privacy Sandbox to make third-party cookies obsolete within 2 years.

Privacy Sandbox will anonymously aggregate user information, keeping much more user information on-device only. The 3 functions Google is looking to replace are ad selection, conversion measurement, and fraud prevention.

Justin Schuh, Director, Chrome Engineering, at Google, wrote that the plan is to start the first origin trials by the end of this year, starting with conversion measurement and following with personalization.

Before killing the third-party cookies, already next month, Google will limit insecure cross-site tracking on Chrome.

Besides, Google today also announced that it will implement new anti-fingerprinting protections on Chrome later this year.

On the buy-side, last year, Google already started to use machine learning to manage ad frequency, when there is no third-party cookies present.

The lack of third-party cookies mainly affects the CPM on sell-side. Google last year published a study concluding that traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present.

Ari Paparo, CEO at Beeswax, wrote in AdExchanger: view-through attribution, third-party data, multitouch attribution, and DMPs are dead with this change.

Paul Gubbins, Programmatic Strat Lead at Unruly, asked yesterday on Twitter: What replaces the 3rd party cookie in AdTech?