Chrome is moving towards a new experience that lets people make an informed choice with respect to third-party cookies.
As Chrome pursues a new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web, preserving user-critical features that rely on third-party cookies remains a priority. To continue minimizing user-facing breakage for the 1% of users who have had third-party cookies restricted for testing, Chrome is extending the grace period that allows sites and services demonstrating user-facing, non-ads breakage to continue to access third-party cookies. Origins using this grace period don't need to deploy deprecation trial tokens; origins that have already deployed tokens don't need to keep them in place. We plan to maintain the grace period at least until we introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.
Background
In January 2024, Chrome restricted third-party cookies for 1% of users to facilitate ad tech industry testing. To prevent disruptions to user-facing features for this 1% testing group, several temporary exceptions were introduced. Among these exceptions are deprecation trials, which allow sites and services to request additional time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies.
Chrome recently proposed a new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing. As Chrome makes plans around this user choice approach, the 1% testing group and the exceptions to prevent user-facing disruptions currently remain in place.
Details of the updated grace period
The grace period allows developers to request additional time to migrate away from third-party cookie dependencies. This exception is available to both top-level sites and third-party embedded sites and services experiencing breakage.
- Newly discovered breakage should be reported to goo.gle/report-3pc-broken. Once the breakage is verified and the eligibility criteria are met, the grace period will be granted.
- Sites and services that previously registered for one of the third-party cookie deprecation trials and are taking advantage of the existing grace period will automatically be granted this exception. With this extension, there is no need to deploy deprecation trial tokens.
Eligibility Criteria
The same eligibility criteria that applied to the deprecation trials apply to the grace period:
- Preserve user-critical functionality: The grace period is intended for both third-party providers and top-level sites that demonstrate functional breakage in user journeys.
- Limit user tracking: The grace period is not intended to support cross-site tracking for advertising purposes, and as such, third-party embeds and services used for advertising are not eligible.
Other exceptions
The other exceptions that Chrome has previously introduced remain in place:
- Heuristics-based exception scenarios
- Enterprise Chrome exceptions
- Temporary exceptions for essential sites
Next steps
We encourage sites and services to continue to reduce their reliance on third-party cookies. We will continue to post updates on Chrome's third-party cookie efforts here on the Privacy Sandbox Developer Blog.