Chrome kept third-party cookies. Plan as if it hadn't.
Cookies stayed in Chrome, but privacy rules and other browsers still decide what you can measure.
Romel PrashadPrincipal consultant, marketing technology & data
In 2025 Google dropped its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome and retired most of Privacy Sandbox. It is tempting to treat that as permission to keep measuring the old way.
The constraints did not go away
- Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies by default, so a large share of mobile and Mac traffic is already invisible to them.
- 24 US states now have comprehensive consumer privacy laws, and people can opt out of targeted advertising.
- Google requires Consent Mode v2 signals to personalize ads for users in the European Economic Area.
Cookie-based reports only see part of the audience
What durable measurement looks like
- First-party data from logged-in experiences, purchases and your CRM.
- Consent that is captured once and respected by every tag.
- Server-side tagging, so you control what each vendor receives.
- Marketing mix modeling and holdouts, which need no user-level tracking.
Teams that build this way are not exposed when the next browser or law changes.
Working on something like this? I help teams fix tracking, build CDPs and make marketing data ready for AI.
Start a conversation