Google Just Disabled Cookies for 30 Million Chrome Users. Here’s How to Tell If You’re One of Them – By Thomas Germain (Gizmodo) / Jan 4, 2024
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.
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