Google Follows Apple in Ending Third-Party ‘Cookies’ in Ad-Tracking

  • Plan aims to ‘render obsolete’ third-party cookies in Chrome
  • Changes may disrupt marketers, publishers that rely on Google

     

Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
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Google is upending the advertising world with its decision to “render obsolete” a key tool used by marketers for years to track would-be customers as they move around the web: It’s phasing out the cookie.

On Tuesday the Alphabet Inc. unit said it would stop supporting third party cookies over the next two years. Cookies -- the bits of code that lodge in peoples’ browsers and follow them around the web -- allow advertisers to target people with ads for websites they previously visited, and keep track of which ads finally induced a purchase.