Google is restricting third-party cookies on Chrome before abandoning them completely

Google on Thursday began restricting third-party cookies among some users of its Chrome browser, in order to begin the transition towards abandoning these trackers that have been criticized for their intrusive nature, a decision that was announced as far back as 2020.

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The American giant said in a statement: “As previously announced, Chrome limits third-party cookies by default to 1% of its users in order to facilitate testing, before increasing the capacity to 100% of users starting in the third quarter of 2020.” Blog post.

Google has determined that a complete abandonment of third-party cookies can only be effective after obtaining advice from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on “potential competition issues”.

Cookies, which are computer files used specifically to track the movement of Internet users and deliver targeted advertising to them, have seen their use become more regulated since the implementation of several standards, in particular the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established by the European Union. Union in 2016, in addition to California regulations.

The term “third-party cookies” is used to refer to cookies that originate from websites visited and not from the browser itself.

Google announced in January 2020 that it was committed to ditching third-party cookies within two years. The implementation of this reform was postponed several times, before it came into effect at the beginning of January.

Google has been working on an alternative cookie system for several years, linked to the browser and not to the sites visited. Instead of targeting individual Internet users, advertisers target audience segments (“FLoCs”) consisting of hundreds or thousands of people.