WASHINGTON: Google is planning to “render obsolete” a key tool advertisers use to track people around the web, increasing user privacy but also disrupting the marketers and publishers who rely on the search giant’s ad products.

“Over the next two years Google intends to stop supporting third-party cookies in its Chrome browser,’’ the Alphabet Inc unit said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Cookies are little bits of code that stick in peoples’ browsers and follow them around the web and are a core part of the online advertising landscape. They allow advertisers to target people with ads for websites they previously visited and make it easier to determine how effective certain ads were in getting internet surfers to buy something.