By Ronan Shields  •  April 22, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

It’s a move that amounts to a U-turn on the Chrome team’s earlier updated approach to deprecating third-party cookies, announced in July last year, with the latest development bound to cause ructions across the ad tech ecosystem.

“We’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies,” wrote Anthony Chavez, vp Privacy Sandbox at Google, in a blog post published earlier today (April 22). “Users can continue to choose the best option for themselves in Chrome’s Privacy and Security Settings.”

However, it’s not the end of Privacy Sandbox, according to Google, as certain initiatives incubated within the project are set to continue, such as its IP Protection for Chrome Incognito users, which will be rolled out in Q3.

Chavez’s blog post goes on to detail how the latest move was prompted by industry feedback following his team’s “updated approach” announcement last year.

“It remains clear that there are divergent perspectives on making changes that could impact the availability of third-party cookies,” according to Chavez’s post, which goes on to note its engagement with regulators such as the U.K.’s competition and data privacy authorities.

He continued, “In light of this update, we understand that the Privacy Sandbox APIs may have a different role to play in supporting the ecosystem. We’ll engage with the industry to gather feedback and share an updated roadmap for these technologies, including our future areas of investment, in the coming months.”

Privacy Sandbox ‘in limbo’

Critics were quick to round on Google following the publication of Privacy Sandbox’s latest progress report earlier this year, which acknowledged feedback on technical challenges within its proposals, especially for attribution.

Despite this, active Privacy Sandbox participants like Criteo-owned BidSwitch, Index Exchange, and Raptive all continued efforts to experiment with its proposed APIs.

However, feedback from such parties emphasized the system’s 1:1 design clashes with ad tech’s multi-party setup, hindering scalability and real-time data processing.

Meanwhile, publishers were hesitant, prioritizing immediate revenue through header bidding, while latency and limited video support pose additional hurdles. Ultimately, this meant that experimentation within Sandbox stalled.

This is a developing story.

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