• Google has announced that it has once more pushed back the timeline for its planned phasing out of third-party cookies from its web browser, Google Chrome. The firm is now targeting to implement the change by the 2nd of half of 2024.  

• T he announcement comes just over a year after its previous announcement, where It had planned to eliminate third-party cookies by the second half of 2023. The firm stated that the decision was made in response to feedback received by developers, publishers, and marketers who would be affected by the decision to provide more time to test alternative technologies. 

• In line with this, the firm stated that it had reached an agreement with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK for developing a privacy sandbox in Chrome in order to resolve the privacy-related concerns raised by regulations. The firm plans to trial its privacy sandbox technologies to Chrome users beginning in August and will be expanded throughout the year in 2023. 

• Google expects this privacy sandbox API to be launched and be available to developers from the third quarter of 2023. 

<ul><li>Analyst QuickTake: Google’s decision to delay the cookie deprecation provides breathing room for marketing automation firms to shift away from cookie-based identity resolution to people-based identity resolution. Earlier in the year, Google announced Topics as an alternative technology for customer identity resolution but publishers and marketers have raised concerns about its effectiveness . Hence, many firms have been developing their own alternatives or entering into partnerships to address this shortcoming. A recent example of this trend is Tealium, a customer data platform (CDP) that collaborated with Merkle to add identity resolution to its CDP .</ul>