Google to turn off cookies for 30 million users today with Chrome's new feature ‘Tracking Protection’

In December, IT giant Google announced that it will be putting an end to the cookies on its browser Google Chrome for 30 million people across the world, or around 1 percent of the total users of Google Chrome.

Google said that the company will automatically block third-party cookies for millions of Chrome users on January 4, preventing other websites from tracking your activity. Further, the browser will replace this technology with 'Tracking Protection'.

Cookies are small pieces of data that are able to track your behaviour while browsing and know your preferences while you visit any specific website. Cookies are mainly used to show a user personalized ads and products, based on their preferences.

However, cookies on third-party websites hosted by Google also have the potential to access your personal details, and can slow down your browser by hoarding the bandwidth. These are some of the reasons why Google has decided to get rid of cookies for millions of users.

While the idea has been implemented for just one percent of all Chrome users, Google is planning to get rid of cookies for all the browser users by the end of 2024. However, since advertising is one of the main sources of revenue for Google, it can't completely get rid of cookies.

Google's Tracking Protection and Ad Topics

In an effort to block cookies from third-party websites, Google has introduced Tracking Protection. This new feature is aimed at stopping cross site tracking, and will be enabled for 30 million Chrome users users across Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS from January 4.

Since Google cannot completely stop its advertising, the Tracking Protection feature will seek help from a new feature called Ad Topics, which will leverage your recent Chrome browsing to assign you interest “topics” to enable relevant ads.

Ad Topics will act on the basis of your search history for a specific period of time, instead of allowing third-party cookies to track your browsing data. Through these features, Google will be able to characterize your interests locally without using cookies.