The ad companies are complaining. This is either a farce or Google is doing something actually useful this time.
Google’s tools for replacing cookies are intended to help the industry meet business goals while respecting consumer privacy, they said.
There isn’t light at the end of the tunnel, it’s another train coming.
The ad companies are complaining that another ad company is building a monopoly over ad data
I love Google’s idea of “privacy”.
We will protect users privacy by ensuring they only give all their data to us.
“Killing Cookies” is not the same as “Killing Third-Party Cookies”
So does anyone know more about what “replacement technologies” Google is rolling out? The article doesn’t really go into it.
They are replacing it with their hilariously named “privacy sandbox” which basically bakes in support for Google ads and Google analytics, so Chrome (not individual websites) stores all the data about your browsing habits.
As far as I can tell, the privacy sandbox cannot be interacted with via plugins, so you get the options Google provides. Considering they just lost a lawsuit for tracking incognito users, I’m not hopeful they will respect any measure they say is privacy preserving.
The “privacy sandbox” is partially Google’s response to Safari and Firefox adding built-in (and automatically enabled) protection against third party cookies several years ago. And partially a way to serve up sites without a GDPR-mandated cookies notice (because the user tracking isn’t technically a cookie, so the law requiring consent doesn’t apply).
It preserves the functionality of third party cookies while giving Google a monopoly over the data they collect. It will also create the illusion that Chrome doesn’t allow websites to set cookies - so they can pretend to be more privacy focused while hiding that they are much less private.
It’s an excellent business move that leverages their near-monopoly browser market share to reinforce their near-monopoly online advertising and analytics products, while subverting consumer privacy laws!
Your browser will track you instead, advertisers can request categories or something along those lines.
Google doesn’t need third party cookies because they’re baking the spyware into the browser, much harder to avoid than blocking or deleting cookies and potentially much more invasive. Third parties are complaining they’re getting shafted because Google has a monopoly on that data. Either way, everyone still using chrome loses.