Google Chrome is discarding third party cookies forever. If everything goes according to plan, future updates to the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it much more difficult to track web activity for billions of people. But it is not so simple. What looks like a huge victory for privacy may ultimately serve only to strengthen Google’s control over the advertising industry and the web as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the move risks putting smaller advertising companies out of business and could hurt sites that rely on ads to make money. For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google plans to put Chrome in control of part of the advertising process. To do this, he plans to use browser-based machine learning to record his browsing history and group people into groups alongside others with similar interests.
“They will get rid of the infrastructure that allows for tracking and creating individualized profiles on the web,” said Bennett Cyphers, a technologist with the Civil Liberties Group at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They are going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising – just doing it in a different way.”
Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from its Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals to improve online ads without destroying the advertising industry. In addition to getting rid of third-party cookies, Privacy Sandbox also deals with issues such as advertising fraud, reducing the number of captchas people see and introducing new ways for companies to measure the performance of their ads. Many Google critics say parts of the proposals are an improvement on the existing configuration and good for the web.
Change is necessary. The online advertising industry is, to put it mildly, heavy. It comprises billions of data points about all of our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a substantial change in this system will impact a range of businesses, from brands that advertise products and services online to ad technology networks and news organizations that drive these ads to all corners of the web.
Privacy Sandbox’s proposals are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others remain firm in the development stage. The Privacy Sandbox is documented online, and Google has changed its plans based on comments and counter-proposals from rivals. But ultimately, when it comes to Chrome, everything is controlled by Google.
Removing third-party cookies from Chrome, first announced in January 2020, took a long time to arrive. “Third-party cookies were horrible,” says Cyphers. “They were the most privacy-invasive technology in the world for a while.” When Google removes them in 2022, it won’t be the first – but their huge market share means it will have the biggest impact. Apple’s Safari, the second largest browser behind Chrome, limited cookie tracking in 2017. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so vast that the browser is currently blocking 10 billion crawlers a day.
If you are currently using Chrome, the websites you visit, with some exceptions, will add a third party cookie to your device. These cookies – small pieces of code – are able to track your browsing history and display ads based on that. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect back to a different domain than the one you are currently on. First-party cookies, by comparison, send data back to the owners of the domain you are currently visiting.
Third-party cookies are the main reason why the shoes you looked at two weeks ago are still chasing you across the web. All data collected by third-party cookies is used to build user profiles, which can include your interests, the things you buy and your online behavior, and this can be sent to obscure data brokers. “The intention really was to initiate a certain set of proposals on how older technologies, such as third-party cookies, as well as others, can be replaced by API alternatives that preserve privacy,” says Chetna Bindra, product leader in the ad business. Of google.