The Vice President of Google overseeing the Privacy Sandbox project announced the cancellation of the plan to disable third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, which are set when visiting domains different from that of the current page. Third-party cookies are used to track user movements across websites in ad network codes, social media widgets, and web analytics systems. Instead of completely phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome, a new interface will be implemented that allows users to independently decide whether to block such cookies and to enable or disable the blocking at any time. Details of the implementation have not yet been disclosed, nor is it clarified how this differs from the existing option in chrome://settings/cookies to "Block third-party cookies."
Mozilla has enabled third-party cookie blocking by default in the release of Firefox 69, launched in 2019. In 2020, third-party cookie blocking was also initiated by default in the Safari browser. Google published its initial intentions to discontinue third-party cookie support in 2019 and planned to implement the phase-out by 2022, but then postponed the end date to mid-2023, later moving it to the fourth quarter of 2024, and has now completely canceled this plan.
The plan to discontinue support for third-party cookies has been canceled due to the negative impact it would have on the established ecosystem of online advertising that allows website authors to distribute content for free. Despite years of efforts by Google, the online advertising industry was not prepared to replace tracking cookies with new specialized APIs that take into account users' privacy needs, such as FedCM (Federated Credential Management, which allows the creation of unified identification services), Private State Tokens (which allow user segmentation without using cross-site identifiers), Topics (which enable user ranking by interest groups), Protected Audience (targeting and studying audiences), and Attribution Reporting (evaluating ad effectiveness).
Cookie-related changes are being advanced under the Privacy Sandbox initiative, aimed at striking a balance between users' need for privacy and the desire of advertising networks and websites to track visitor preferences. Previously, attempts to implement replacements for tracking cookies in Chrome faced resistance from the community and criticism that the methods being introduced to replace tracking cookies do not address all issues and create new risks, such as the potential for user discrimination and an added factor for covert identification and tracking of user movements. Recently, the EFF announced that it has included tools in the latest update of the Privacy Badger browser extension to block user tracking capabilities based on the use of APIs developed under the Privacy Sandbox initiative.
Additionally, it is worth noting Google's plan mentioned in the announcement to add a feature to incognito mode in Chrome that allows hiding an IP address the user from website owners, implemented by routing traffic not directly, but through a proxy server. With the use of this new mode, the target server will see only the proxy's IP address as the incoming address, similar to using VPN. To anonymize the request, there is a mention of the possibility of passing the request sequentially through several proxies. In this case, information about the client's IP address will only be known to the first proxy, while the second proxy in the chain will see the address of the first proxy.
Source: opennet.ru
