Last month, Google revised its target timeline for FLoC, the new privacy-focused replacement technology for advertising and other tracking cookies, to 2023. The company now has a more accurate timeline of events. for its multi-step plan to implement federated cohort learning. for Chrome, which is now in the early stages of testing.

Previously slated to be fully implemented in Chrome later in 2022, Google is now aiming (via 9to5Google) to switch all users from Chrome to FLoC in the third quarter of 2023. By then, the company hopes to have weaned off conventional cookies, tracking web traffic and individual user usage patterns, to aggregate tracking that allows advertisers to track anonymized groups of people instead. Google says it’s a way to protect individual privacy while preserving the advertising systems that make the web work, but at this point, they haven’t been able to convince virtually anyone that FLoC will be an improvement.

The new timeline site, part of Google’s expanding Privacy Sandbox, shows which components are still in discussion, which are under testing, and when all will (hopefully) be implemented. FLoC in particular will not be tested on a large scale until the third quarter of this year, although a small number of users are already testing. This will run until summer 2022, with the initial transition period to full Chrome adoption starting in just over a year.

Image credit: Arun Thomas