Google will start to replace the use of cookies in the Chrome web browser on January 4 with a new concept called Privacy Sandbox. They will first disable cookies for 30 million Chrome users (1% of them). This move comes many years after cookie blockers and other tracker blockers became commonplace in VPNs, web browsers and other apps users have been using to protect their data.
This decision is still a step towards improved data handling and privacy as the Privacy Sandbox involves browser-based tracking that stores the data on your machine instead of sending it off to Google. If this is true, it will cut down on bandwidth usage and improve user privacy while continuing to provide relevant advertisements.
Cookies have already been reduced to a small part of the mechanisms used to collect and sell user data — especially since people started deleting cookies with a few clicks. This means that shutting them down would be a drop in the bucket. IP addresses, logged in users’ email addresses, device identifiers among other tools have been used to collect far more data than cookies ever did.
