Google Chrome is permanently abandoning third-party cookies. If all goes according to plan, future updates to the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it difficult for billions of people to monitor web activity. But it’s not that simple. What seems like a big win for privacy can ultimately only serve to bolster Google’s reach over the advertising industry and the web as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the measure runs the risk of leaving smaller advertising companies and could hurt ad-dependent websites to make money. For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google plans to control Chrome with some advertising processes. To do this, plan to use browser-based machine learning to record your browsing history and group people into groups with others with similar interests.
“They will be removed from the infrastructure that allows for individualized monitoring and profiling on the network,” says Bennett Cyphers, a civil liberties group technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They will replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising, just by 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 forgetting the advertising industry. Aside from getting rid of third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also addresses issues such as ad fraud, reducing the number of captchas people see, and introducing new ways for companies to measure the performance of their ads. Many critics of Google say that some of the proposals are an improvement on existing settings and are good for the web.
Change is needed. The online advertising industry is, to say the least, little work. They comprise billions of data points about all of our lives that are automatically exchanged every second of every day. Such a substantial change in this system will affect many companies, from brands that advertise products and services online to advertising technology networks and news organizations that drive these ads to every corner of the web.
Sandbox privacy proposals are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others are firmly in development. Privacy Sandbox is documented online and Google has modified its plans based on comments and counter-proposals from rivals. But ultimately, when it comes to Chrome, everything is controlled by Google.
Chrome’s third-party cookie removal, first announced in January 2020, has been a long time coming. “Third-party cookies were terrible,” Cyphers says. “They were the most invasive privacy 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 Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so vast that the browser currently blocks 10 billion crawlers a day.
If you use Chrome right now, the websites you visit, with a few exceptions, will add a third-party cookie to your device. These cookies (small snippets of code) can track your browsing history and show ads based on that. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect to a different domain than the one currently on. Own cookies, in comparison, transmit the data to the owners of the domain you are visiting at that time.
Third-party cookies are the main reason why the shoes you observed two weeks ago are still chasing you on the net. All data collected by third-party cookies is used to create user profiles, which may include your interests, the things you buy, and your online behavior, and this can be returned to murky data intermediaries. “The intention was to really start a certain set of proposals on how older technologies like third-party cookies, as well as others, can be replaced by API alternatives that preserve privacy,” says Chetna Bindra, product manager for the advertising business. from Google.