Glossary
CHIPS
Published · Last updated
Next scheduled review:
CHIPS, Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State, is a browser feature that lets an embedded service set a Partitioned cookie, stored separately for each top-level site, so it cannot follow the user across sites.
Embedded services such as chat widgets, maps, payment frames and video players need cookies to keep state. A normal third-party cookie is shared across every site that embeds the service, and that sharing is what makes cross-site tracking possible. A partitioned cookie is keyed to both the embedded service and the top-level site, so the same service gets a different cookie jar on each site.
Google built CHIPS as part of the Privacy Sandbox, and it is one of the few parts that survived. Chrome has supported it by default since version 114, after an origin trial that ran from Chrome 100 to 116. When Google retired most Sandbox technologies on 17 October 2025, it said CHIPS had broad adoption, including support from other browsers, and that it would keep supporting it (Google, 17 October 2025).
Google's feature status page still listed CHIPS as "continue to support" on 14 August 2026 (Google, Privacy Sandbox feature status). For ad tech, CHIPS is not a tracking tool. It cannot carry a user ID from one publisher to another, so it does not replace cookie syncing. It keeps embedded services working where browsers block unpartitioned third-party cookies.
Example: Google's documentation shows the header Set-Cookie: __Host-example=34d8g; SameSite=None; Secure; Path=/; Partitioned; (Google, CHIPS documentation). A support widget that sets this cookie on news.example and on shop.example gets two separate cookies, one for each site.
Related terms: Privacy Sandbox, Topics API, cookie sync, consent mode, user matching.