Google Chrome is delete third-party cookies for good. If all goes 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 the web activity of billions of people. But it is not that simple. Ultimately, what seems like a major win for privacy can only serve to solidify Google’s grip on the ad industry and the internet as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the move poses the risk of smaller ad agencies going out of business and damaging websites that rely on ads to make money. The change will be invisible to most people, but behind the scenes, Google plans to let Chrome manage part of the advertising process. To do this, it plans to use browser-based machine learning to record your browsing history and group people together in groups alongside others with similar interests.
“They are going to remove the infrastructure that enables individualized tracking and profiling on the Internet,” said Bennett Cyphers, a technologist with the Civil Liberties Group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They are going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising, but does it in a different way.”
Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from the Privacy Sandbox, a series of proposals to improve online advertising without obliterating the ad industry. In addition to removing third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also addresses things like ad fraud, reducing the number of captchas people see, and introducing new ways for businesses to measure the performance of their ads. Many Google critics say parts of the proposals are an improvement on the existing setup and are good for the web.
Change is needed. The online advertising industry is impractical to say the least. It contains billions of data points across all of our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a substantial change to this system will affect a wide range of businesses, from brands that advertise products and services online to the ad networks and news organizations that send these ads to every corner of the Internet.
Privacy Sandbox’s proposals are complicated and technical. Some are already testing Google, while others remain firmly in the development phase. Privacy Sandbox has been documented online, and Google has changed its plans based on feedback and counter-proposals from rivals. But when it comes to Chrome, everything is managed by Google.
The removal of third-party cookies from Chrome, first announced in January 2020, has been a long time coming. “Third-party cookies were terrible,” says Cyphers. “They were the most privacy-invasive technology in the world for a while.” If Google removes them in 2022, it won’t be the first, but the massive market share does mean it will have the biggest impact. Apple’s Safari, the second largest browser behind Chrome, restricted cookie tracking in 2017. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so great that the browser is currently blocking 10 billion trackers per day.
If you are currently using Chrome, the websites you visit will, with a few exceptions, add a third-party cookie to your device. These cookies – small pieces of code – can track your browsing history and display ads based on it. Third-party cookies send any data they collect back to a domain other than the one you are currently on. In comparison, first-party cookies 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 still make you sneak up on the Internet. Any data collected by third-party cookies is used to build user profiles including your interests, the things you buy and your online behavior, and this can be fed back to shady data brokers. “It really was to make some proposals on how to replace older technologies, such as third-party cookies and others, with API alternatives that preserve privacy,” said Chetna Bindra, a product leader in Google’s advertising business .