Google Wants to Phase out Cookies

Google has announced that it is giving itself a two-year term to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The cookies are small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information or to record the user's browsing activity.

The company announced that its Privacy program, launched in August, will continue to allow providers to distribute messages, avoiding the ability for people to be monitored by cookies while using the browser.

"The goal is for 'third-party' sites, which are not related to the search engine but to the site visited, to become 'outdated' within two years," 

"This is our strategy to re-architect the standards of the web, to make it privacy-preserving by default," Justin Schuh, Google's director for Chrome engineering told Tech Crunch.

Cookies' use has been criticized by privacy advocates, but backed by developers of free online services that rely on ad revenue.