Google Chrome is permanently giving up cookies from third parties. If all goes according to plan, then 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’s not that simple. What appears to be a great gain for privacy may ultimately only serve to tighten Google’s control over the advertising industry and the web as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the move risks taking smaller advertising companies out of business and could damage ad-based sites to make money. For most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google intends to put Chrome in control of some of its advertising processes. To do this, it intends to use browser-based machine learning to record your browsing history and group people into groups with others with similar interests.
“They will get rid of the infrastructure that allows individual tracking and profiling on the web,” says Bennett Cyphers, a technologist with the Civil Liberties Group’s Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’re going to replace it with something that still allows targeted advertising – they’re just doing it differently.”
Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from its Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals to improve online ads without eliminating the advertising industry. In addition to getting rid of third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also addresses issues such as ad fraud, reducing the number of captcha people people see, and introducing new ways for companies to measure performance. their ads. Many Google critics say that some parts of the proposals are an improvement of the existing configuration and are good for the web.
Change is needed. To put it mildly, the online advertising industry is difficult. It contains billions of data points about all our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a substantial change to this system will have an impact on a number of companies, from brands that promote products and services online to advertising technology networks and news organizations that drive these ads in every corner of the web.
Sandbox’s privacy proposals are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others remain firmly in the development phase. Sandbox’s privacy is documented online, and Google has changed its plans based on feedback and counter-proposals from rivals. But in the end, when it comes to Chrome, everything is controlled by Google.
The removal of third-party cookies from Chrome, first announced in January 2020, has come a long time. “Third-party cookies were awful,” says Cyphers. “They were for a time the most invasive technology in the world.” When Google removes them in 2022, it won’t be the first – but its huge market share means it will have the biggest impact. Apple Safari, the second largest browser behind Chrome, limited the tracking of cookies in 2017. Firefox Mozilla blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so vast that the browser currently blocks 10 billion trackers a day.
If you use Chrome right now, then 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 them. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect to a different domain than the one you are currently in. Primary cookies, by comparison, transmit data 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 follow you on the web. 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 may be returned to troubled data brokers. “The intention was really to initiate a certain set of proposals on how older technologies, such as third-party cookies, as well as others, can be replaced with alternative APIs that preserve confidentiality,” says Chetna Bindra, a leader in Google advertising products.