Google delays banning third-party cookies until late 2024

We're still at least two years away from abandoning intrusive cookies, fingerprinting, and other technologies that monitor user information and activity across numerous sites for advertising in favour of Google's preferred Privacy Sandbox set of substitutes. Google said in early 2020 that it will phase down support for third-party monitoring cookies in Chrome within two years – that's about two and a half years (and one worldwide pandemic) ago.
Google Privacy Sandbox vice president Anthony Chavez writes in a blog post: "We now expect to begin phasing away third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024."

Regulatory pressure prompted a prior delay, pushing the window into 2023, but its current development method (although not the underlying technology, so far) has permission from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA); so this might be the final time it's pushed back.

Google is now developing a new set of APIs (including several you may have heard of, such as Fledge or Topics API) that it believes may strike a compromise between safeguarding privacy and enabling the online advertising economy, which is at the heart of its business. Developers may immediately test the APIs on their websites and applications, and if you're using a beta version of Chrome, it may already be enabled for you.

The aim is to increase the set of Chrome users who have Privacy Sandbox APIs enabled to "millions of users globally" in August, then gradually opt more people in during the rest of the year and into 2023, allowing publishers and developers of these sites time to figure out how the technology works before the APIs become "generally available" in Q3 of 2023.

If you use Chrome, Google says you will get a popup with the option to control your participation as it becomes available to you.