Google Crunches Its Cookies Faster

Ongoing privacy concerns have pressured Google into announcing a change with the cookies they use to remember a user's preferences.

Google Crunches Its Cookies Fasterofficial Google blog "After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies - as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time," he said.

The 2038 cookies will go away, and a two-year cookie will be baked to replace it. While it looks like a significant change on the surface, Google's cookie will effectively function for regular Google users just like the current cookie does.

As Fleischer explained, the two-year cookie auto-renews every time a browser visits Google. Instead of that fixed expiration date 31 years from now, those cookies will gain new life with every subsequent Google visit.

A long-lived cookie becomes one with serial immortality. People with concerns about cookies on their machines should manage them with their browser's tools, if they really want to control how long a cookie, Google's or anyone else's, resides on their machines.