Google admits it can’t quite quit third-party cookies

For more than a year, Google has said it would phase out the third-party tracking cookies that power much of its advertising business online, proposing new ideas that would allegedly preserve user privacy while still providing businesses with steady revenue streams.

This week, Google tossed much of that work aside.

In an update about Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the tech giant said that due to feedback from authorities and other stakeholders in advertising, it is looking at a new path forward in finding the balance between privacy and an ad-supported internet.

The underlying grounds for the difficulty in finding the balance are not hard to understand. The effectiveness of advertising is determined by whether you’re able to reach your target audience, but the processes involved in determining whether a website visitor belongs to your target audience or not often means that the website publisher gathers information about said visitor, which can quickly become a privacy issue.

The common method to track a visitor’s online behavior was and still involves third-party cookies. You can look at them as small files that your browser drags along the internet while sites record your interests and online behavior in them. They are the reason why you suddenly see advertisements for an article you have looked at in an online store.

When the advertising industry collectively decided they needed something better than cookies, Google introduced the Privacy Sandbox as a “secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy.” The idea was to get rid of third-party cookies altogether.

Later, Google started experimenting with FLoC, or “Federated Learning of Cohorts.” FLoC aimed to become a privacy-focused solution intent on delivering relevant ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This way, user behavior would be processed as anonymized accounts, grouped by interests. Most importantly, user information would processed on-device rather than broadcast across the web.

The idea was to get rid of third-party cookies by 2022, but the implementation of FLoC caused so much push-back from privacy experts that Google abandoned the idea.

Then Google came up with Topics, an idea based on Privacy Sandbox where the user does not get tracked based on the sites they visit, but where each site displays contextual advertising, which means the ads match with the content on the page. But Google had to ask websites not to abuse the topics API and other browser developers showed no interest in adopting the API.

Despite Google Chrome’s browser market share (>60%), it does not have the influence needed to persuade its competitors. And the pressure is on, since other browsers like Safari and Firefox went ahead and already started blocking third-party cookies. Ironic, because the push to eliminate third-party cookies was set in motion by Google and now it’s lagging behind.

So, Google is back with a new path for the Privacy Sandbox. It proposes:

“An updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”

Strengthened with a new feature called IP Protection in Chrome’s Incognito Mode, this should protect the user from being identified by third parties as a potential target IP address for web-wide cross-site tracking.

Does that mean there will be yet another prompt asking the user what they want? It looks like it. But first, Google intends to put out its feelers to find out what regulators and the advertising industry have to say about this new approach.

We have a feeling that this will not be the end of this saga, and we will keep our readers informed about new developments.

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