On the Whereabouts of Third-Party Cookies

In the engineering portion of our "Web Design Trends 2024" seminar (in Japanese) held late last year, I covered the theme of third-party cookie abolition.

Basically, cookies are information that is stored by web browsers when a website is accessed. Cookies issued from a domain different to the one being visited are referred to as third-party cookies.

Cookies have long been used to collect browsing history and deliver appropriate, past activity-related advertisements, however, concerns about privacy violations have spread, and, in recent years, there has been a noticeable movement to regulate such third-party cookies.

During the seminar, in particular, I introduced Google Chrome related regulations. The main points were as follows:

• Chrome plans to phase out third-party cookies from the third quarter of 2024
• The "Tracking Protection" feature was to be tested from January 2024, disabling third-party cookies for 1% of users（Google shares update on next step toward phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome）
• In the future, the Privacy Sandbox, currently under development, will offer an alternative technology

So, following the precedents set by Apple's Safari (see Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More | WebKit) and Mozilla`s Firefox (see Firefox Rolls Out Total Cookie Protection By Default), finally the function should soon become unavailable on Chrome ...... however, the tide, it seems, has changed.

As of July 22, Google has reversed its policy of discontinuing third-party cookies. You can read the announcement here - A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web.

After frequent delays in the effort to abolish third-party cookies, some readers may not be surprised by this announcement. I too feel this way, but what I found surprising, however, was the W3C's immediate reaction.

The Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the W3C, a standards organization for web technology in which Google, as well as our company, participates as a member, released a document titled Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed on July 26. The reasoning is further explained in the blog post "Third-party cookies have got to go" dated July 29.

Through these documents and articles, the W3C positions third-party cookies as harmful to the web. They also clearly express concern about Google's announcement. The following passage from the above-mentioned blog post demonstrates a strong sense of disappointment:

While we haven't always agreed with the Privacy Sandbox team, we have made substantial progress together. This announcement came out of the blue, and undermines a lot of the work we've done together to make the web work without third-party cookies.

I believe that the trend for abolishing third-party cookies is now set and unlikely to be reversed in the future. However, going forward, it will be interesting to see how (or, perhaps, whether) Google reacts to this.

Digressing from the above, later this year we are planning to hold our "Web Design Trends 2025" seminar. As many look forward to the event, for which we are very grateful, we are pleased to be providing advanced notification.