We mean it this time. Like, really dead.
This is hardly a surprising announcement, right? Google’s decision to keep third-party cookies basically signaled this was coming. The company also faced constant regulatory pushback over Privacy Sandbox, which, ironically, was an initiative meant to appease regulators on privacy.
Anyway, consider this recent series of events:
- In July 2024, Google said, “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, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”
- Then, in April 2025, Google said, “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.”
Come on—is anyone really shocked?
In its latest and hopefully final blog post, Google framed the decision as being driven by industry feedback, citing “low levels of adoption” and “ecosystem feedback about their expected value.” After a half-decade of development, the initiative ends with a slow, if not predictable collapse.
Why This Matters:
Does anything really change here since we already knew third-party cookies were sticking around? There likely wasn’t more investment in GPS following that announcement. Among Google’s challenges, cookies and privacy now seem like some of the least concerning. The company is instead grappling with larger, more existential issues: antitrust scrutiny, declining search usage, market share loss to AI-first competitors, and a growing perception that it’s too slow on innovation to maintain its dominance.
By the way—can companies that spent years investing in Privacy Sandbox get their money back? The sunk costs were real, both in engineering time and opportunity cost.
Privacy Sandbox was first proposed in 2019, and was the company’s attempt to reinvent online advertising without third-party cookies by introducing a collection of APIs for targeting and measurement. It was pitched as a compromise between user privacy and what the ad industry wanted to succeed.
Experts React:
Here are some of the best takes we’ve seen on X about the announcement:
Our Take:
We have lots of questions in the aftermath of this decision. For instance, does anyone truly care about cookies anymore? Online behavior is shifting toward LLMs and AI-based chat experiences, which are far more upfront (though not necessarily more transparent, in our view) about training on user data to deliver personalized experiences—and no one seems to mind. Perhaps the market has moved on, and the era of privacy theater that coaxed Google into launching Privacy Sandbox is finally over.
