LONDON (AP) — Google is dropping plans to get rid of cookies from its Chrome internet browser, making a sudden U-turn on 4 years of labor to part out a know-how that helps companies tracks customers on-line.

The corporate had been engaged on retiring third-party cookies, that are snippets of code that log consumer info, as a part of an effort to overtake consumer privateness choices on Chrome. However the proposal, also called Privateness Sandbox, had instilled fears within the internet advertising trade that any alternative know-how would go away even much less room for on-line advert rivals.

In a weblog put up on Monday, Google stated it determined to desert the plan after contemplating the influence of the modifications on publishers, advertisers and “everybody concerned in internet advertising.”

The U.Okay.’s main competitors regulator, which has been concerned in oversight of the Privateness Sandbox venture, stated Google will, as a substitute, give customers the choice to dam or permit third-party cookies on the browser.

Google will “introduce a brand new expertise in Chrome that lets individuals make an knowledgeable alternative that applies throughout their internet shopping, they usually’d be capable of alter that alternative at any time,” Anthony Chavez, vp of Privateness Sandbox, stated within the put up. “We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and can have interaction with the trade as we roll this out.”

Advertisers use cookies to focus on adverts to internet customers however privateness campaigners say they can be utilized to trace customers throughout the web.

Google first proposed scrapping cookies in 2020, however the deadline for ending the work had slipped a couple of instances. Chrome is the world’s dominant internet browser, and lots of others like Microsoft’s Edge are based mostly on the corporate’s Chromium know-how.