It’s the beginning of the end in Google’s plan to kill cookies forever.
Today marks the first of many upcoming moments of silence in Google’s years-long plan to kill cookies. As of this morning, the Chrome web browser disabled cookies for 1% of its users, about 30 million people. By the end of the year, cookies will be gone in Chrome forever—sort of.
For privacy advocates, cookies are the original sin of the internet. Throughout most of the web’s history, cookies were one of the primary ways that tech companies tracked your behavior online. For targeted ads and many other kinds of tracking, websites rely on cookies made by other companies (such as Google). These are known as “third-party cookies,” and they’re built into the internet’s infrastructure. They’re everywhere. If you visited Gizmodo without an ad blocker or some other kind of tracking protection, we might have given you some cookies ourselves. Sorry.
Back in 2019, years of bad news about Google, Facebook, and other tech companies’ privacy malpractices got so loud that Silicon Valley had to address it. Google, which makes the vast majority of its money tracking you and showing you ads online, announced that it was embarking on a project to get rid of third-party cookies in Chrome. Something like 60% of internet users are on Chrome, so Google getting rid of the technology will essentially kill cookies forever.
“We are making one of the largest changes to how the Internet works at a time when people, more than ever, are relying on the free services and content that the web offers,” Victor Wong, Google’s senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, told Gizmodo in an interview in April of 2023. “The mission of the Privacy Sandbox team writ large is to keep people’s activity private across a free and open Internet, and that supports the broader company mission, which is to make sure that information is still accessible for everyone and useful.”
January 4th, 2023, marks the first phase of Google’s grand cookie-killing spree. If you’re among the 30 million people to experience the joy of a cookieless web, here’s what you’ll see.
How to tell if Google turned off your cookies
The first thing you’ll see is a popup in Chrome, describing Google’s new “Tracking Protection,” as the company calls its cookie murder plan. If you’re like so many of us, you respond to pop-ups with an extreme vigilance that often overlooks the contents of whatever messages your computer wants you to see, so you might miss it.
