Google keeps third-party cookies in Chrome and drops the user-choice prompt

On April 22, 2025, Google officially announced that it would abandon its plan to introduce a standalone user-choice prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome and would continue supporting third-party cookies indefinitely. This marked the final chapter in a years-long saga that began in 2020 when Google first announced its intention to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022. The deadline was repeatedly pushed back — to 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — amid regulatory scrutiny, industry pushback, and the unresolved development of the Privacy Sandbox as an alternative. The decision to drop the choice prompt, which had been proposed as a compromise following pressure from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), effectively ends the deprecation effort entirely. The announcement represents a significant reversal of one of the most consequential and disruptive policy decisions in AdTech history. Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aimed to develop privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies such as the Topics API and Protected Audience API, had consumed enormous industry resources and attention for over five years. The CMA had been closely monitoring Google's deprecation plans as part of its commitments framework, and the decision to retain cookies without a choice prompt raised fresh questions about regulatory compliance and Google's obligations under its 2022 commitments to the UK regulator. This outcome is significant for the AdTech ecosystem because it restores a degree of stability to the identity and targeting infrastructure that the open web relies upon. However, it does not resolve the underlying tensions around privacy, data governance, and Google's dominant position in the advertising stack. Many companies that had invested heavily in cookieless alternatives — including clean rooms, first-party data platforms, and identity graphs — now face a recalibrated market where the urgency of cookie replacement has diminished, at least in the near term.

The decision to retain third-party cookies in Chrome has wide-ranging implications across the AdTech landscape. In the short term, it provides relief to publishers, advertisers, and ad tech vendors who had been bracing for significant revenue and targeting disruptions. Programmatic advertising, which relies heavily on cookie-based audience targeting, retargeting, and frequency capping, can continue operating on established infrastructure without the need for immediate migration to alternative identity solutions. DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, and ad networks that had been hedging their bets with Privacy Sandbox API integrations can now deprioritize those investments. For companies that had positioned themselves as cookieless identity solutions — such as The Trade Desk's Unified ID 2.0, LiveRamp's RampID, ID5, and others — the competitive urgency of their value proposition is somewhat diminished. However, the long-term trajectory toward privacy-centric advertising remains intact, driven by Safari and Firefox's existing cookie blocking, evolving global privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, and others), and growing consumer awareness. These identity players will likely argue that first-party and privacy-safe identity solutions remain strategically important regardless of Chrome's cookie policy. Clean room providers such as Habu, InfoSum, and Snowflake's data collaboration tools may similarly see reduced near-term demand pressure, though enterprise data collaboration use cases remain compelling independently. Google itself faces continued regulatory scrutiny. The CMA and potentially the European Commission may question whether abandoning the choice prompt violates Google's prior commitments. The decision also reinforces criticism that Google used the deprecation threat strategically to advance Privacy Sandbox APIs that could entrench its own advertising ecosystem. For the broader industry, the episode underscores the need for diversified identity strategies and highlights the outsized influence a single browser vendor can have on the entire digital advertising economy.