Google is once again postponing the end of third-party cookie support in the Chrome browser

We won’t be able to do it by the end of this year, says Google in its current statement on the gradual end of support for third-party cookies in the Google Chrome browser. The originally announced date is therefore being moved to somewhere around the beginning of 2025. Given that the company has moved the end date of cookies several times in the past, this date is not certain either.

The company published the delay as part of an announcement that this week it will issue a regular quarterly report with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the development of the Privacy Sandbox platform, which is supposed to replace 3rd party cookies in Chrome.

He justifies the shift of the deadline by the need to take into account the reactions of regulators, developers and the advertising industry. Another reason, according to Google, is that the CMA has requested the results of the Privacy Sandbox testing from the market, which it is supposed to receive by the end of June. Then it will need enough time to evaluate them, Google says.

Media and companies operating advertising systems have been preparing for a long time for the end of support for 3rd party cookies in the last widely used browser that supports them. Across the web, there is an effort to get users to use services to log in or consent to the processing of their data for ad targeting.

For example, Facebook started giving users a choice last year: they either give their consent or they have to start paying a monthly subscription. However, this procedure, simply called “pay or ok”, is not liked by the authorities for the protection of personal data. Major online services should offer content for free and without targeted advertising, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has said. In the Czech Republic, the publishing house Czech News Center (CNC) has started showing users a similar option on some of its websites, and Seznam.cz is also testing it.

Seznam.cz also prepares for the end of third-party cookies in other ways. Together with the publishing association CPEx, it is developing the Czech Ad ID system, which is intended to enable the sharing of anonymized data about registered users across the Czech market for the purpose of advertising targeting. The end of cookies should also affect partnerships with websites within the so-called newsfeed on the main page of Seznam (the company Internet Info, the publisher of Lupa, is also involved in the program – editor’s note.).

The end of third-party cookies will also affect the audited measurement of website traffic in the Czech Republic. The Association for Internet Development (SPIR) has launched a tender for the operator of NetMonitor, which provides measurement even without cookies.