Farewell, cookies, as you fly ever so slowly to that big third party in the sky.
On Thursday, Google announced that the targeting and measurement APIs in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox are generally available for the majority of Chrome users.
Google has been ramping up availability of its APIs since July.
The APIs will roll out to 100% of users “within the coming months,” according to Google. Meanwhile, Google is excluding 3% of users as a holdout group for its own A/B testing purposes.
The countdown continues
But developers and ad tech companies can start running scaled tests and integrating the APIs into their own offerings now.
The Privacy Sandbox APIs “are in a stable state,” Anthony Chavez, VP of product management for the Privacy Sandbox, wrote in a blog post, and “the countdown to the planned deprecation of third-party cookies is in full effect.”
“Having reached this stage after extensive industry feedback,” Chavez wrote, “we don’t plan to make any significant changes to the API interfaces ahead of third-party cookie deprecation.”
Chrome will release a mechanism to simulate third-party-cookieless traffic next quarter, as planned, then switch off third-party cookies for 1% of a randomly selected group of Chrome users in Q1 2024.
Barring intervention by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which maintains oversight of the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, third-party cookies in Chrome will completely phase out by the second half of 2024.
The consumer POV
The question now is this: How will Chrome users react to the Privacy Sandbox?
Most of Google’s work to date has been behind-the-scenes trying to assure the CMA that its Privacy Sandbox technologies aren’t anti-competitive and convince ad tech vendors the APIs are worth testing.
Those efforts are bearing fruit. The CMA doesn’t seem to be standing in Google’s way, and ad industry adoption is growing.
There appears to be a great deal of skepticism on the consumer side, however, about what this whole Chrome Privacy Sandbox thing is about.
Articles are cropping up online with headlines like, “How to turn off Google Chrome’s built-in Advertising features” and “How to Turn Off Google Chrome’s Targeted Advertisements (By Disabling the Privacy Sandbox).”
A piece published this week on The Verge about the Topics API tells readers: “If the idea of sharing information about your interests with third parties doesn’t thrill you, you can easily turn it off.”
Although all of the APIs are enabled by default, Google also released enhanced ad privacy controls within Chrome on Thursday that let users disable specific APIs, see which topics are associated with their browsing history and remove the ones they don’t like.
Users can also opt out of the Chrome Privacy Sandbox altogether.
We’ll just have to wait and see how many do.
