Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks to the media before the opening of the Berlin representation of Google Germany in Berlin on January 22, 2019.

Google said it would be updating its Chrome browser to give users more information about how they're being tracked across the web using cookies.

The changes, among other moves in the digital world toward more privacy features, will likely have deep implications for how some advertising players target consumers online.

The new Chrome feature was one of several Google announced Tuesday to show it's a proponent of consumer privacy. Apple has also tried to position itself as a champion for consumer privacy for its device owners. It recently unveiled a new version of its anti-tracking tool Intelligent Tracking Prevention, cutting a first-party cookie's lifespan to track your browsing history. Apple has also highlighted its privacy features in commercials and billboard ads.

But Google's changes could be a blow to other digital marketing companies, many of which use cookies to target ads and see whether they're performing. And industry players wondered whether Google might give its own tracking preferential treatment while boxing out other players. Some players say they're relieved about the immediate changes, but are preparing their businesses for a world where cookie usage is lessened.

"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," Google engineers wrote in a blog post on the Chrome changes

Chrome will enable users to clear all of those cookies, while not affecting single domain cookies, which preserve things like logins and settings. Users will also be given clear information about which sites are setting these cookies "so users can make informed choices about how their data is used," the post said.

In the post, Chrome developers also said the browser would more aggressively restrict "fingerprinting" — which they define as harder-to-detect methods of user tracking that subvert cookie controls — across the web, in part by "reducing the ways in which browsers can be passively fingerprinted, so that we can detect and intervene against active fingerprinting efforts as they happen."

Some experts wondered whether Google will have to play by the same rules as third-party advertisers, and whether if Google cookies were blocked, the browser would still be able to track a user using their Google ID if they were logged in.

A Google spokesperson said the measures will apply to everyone, including Google.

But industry players like Dataxu CEO Mike Baker said he was worried whether Google might give its own ad tech business a free pass for being operated under the same brand. Dataxu is an advertising tech company that runs digital and linear TV advertising using data and analytics.

"Do Google's self-defined rules of the road favor companies like Google that combine a consumer-facing business with an ad tech business (giving their own ad tech business a free pass because its operated under the same brand)?" Baker wrote in an email to CNBC. "And especially given the recent experience with Facebook, how do we know that Google or any other Big Tech company is actually doing what they say they are doing?"

A Deutsche Bank analyst said in a note in late March that Google could "inflame already high antitrust concerns if it does something in Chrome," AdExchanger reported at the time.

Google wouldn't provide any further details around how users would be shown information about cookies, or exactly how the information would be phrased.