Google is restricting cookies settings on Chrome to improve privacy

Good news for Chrome users as the tech giant Google is taking steps to be more transparent and give control back to users by updating how cookies settings are handled by its Chrome browser.

According to Google, the changes “help improve user privacy and security on the web.”

In a blog post published Tuesday, Google announced the changes it’s making to its popular browser. To be clear, cookies improve your browsing experience, but they are also used to track your activity to serve personalised content and ads. And of course, not everyone wants this.

“Unfortunately, to browsers, all of these different types of cookies look the same, which makes it difficult to tell how each cookie is being used — limiting the usefulness of cookie controls,”  Ben Galbraith director of Chrome product management and Justin Schuh, director of Chrome Engineering say in the jointly authored blog.

They explain: “For instance, when you clear all of your cookies, you’re logged out of all sites and your online preferences are reset. Because of this, blunt solutions that block all cookies can significantly degrade the simple web experience that you know today, while heuristic-based approaches—where the browser guesses at a cookie’s purpose—make the web unpredictable for developers.”

The changes

Googles proposed change means that developers will have to specify which cookies are allowed to work across websites — and which could be used to track users.

“We are making a number of upcoming changes to Chrome to enable these features, starting with modifying how cookies work so that developers need to explicitly specify which cookies are allowed to work across websites–and could be used to track users,” the writers say.

The post also reiterates Google’s commitment to ” building a better web and improving the user experience.”

“We launched Chrome ten years ago with the objective of building a better web and improving the user experience, Galbraith and Schuh, writes,  “while our browser has evolved since 2008, our objective remains the same,” the post concludes.