In a blog post, the company finally admitted that third-party cookies are here to stay. — Dreamstime/TNS
For years, Google promised to make the internet respect your privacy. It came up with a grand plan that included blocking third-party cookies by default – something its competitors like Safari and Firefox already do.
Cookies, you’ll remember, are those little pieces of code that websites use to track your activity across the internet. It’s how advertisers are able to target you with products they know you’re interested in because they know how you spend your time online.
Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, was going to lead the charge by blocking third-party cookies by default. Instead, it came up with an alternative, called Privacy Sandbox, which would let marketers measure and target ads without directly spying on anyone.
After years of slowly backing down, Google said in April that it wasn’t going to kill off third-party cookies at all. Now, it’s saying it’s ending Privacy Sandbox altogether.
In a blog post full of corporate phrasing – ecosystem feedback, interoperable attribution standards, and collaboration with stakeholders – Google announced that it’s retiring almost every piece of Privacy Sandbox. Topics, Attribution Reporting, Protected Audience, IP Protection, Shared Storage, SDK Runtime – are all deprecated. What’s left are a few technical odds and ends like CHIPS and FedCM, and some vague promises about “continuing engagement.”
That’s a polite way of saying Google is giving up.
The thing is, Google was the only company that could have forced the web to change. More specifically, it’s the only company that could have forced the internet to respect your privacy. If Google flipped the switch, the rest of the web would have to adapt.
The reason it isn’t is more complicated than you might think. It’s not that Google is maintaining cookies so it can continue tracking what you do online. It doesn’t have to – it already knows basically everything about its users because they literally type the thing they’re looking for into Google’s search box.
Killing cookies wouldn’t hurt Google’s data business. It would, however, hurt everyone else’s. And that’s a big problem.
If Chrome had actually followed through and killed cookies, it would have devastated the entire ad-tech ecosystem. Independent publishers would lose revenue overnight. Smaller ad platforms would vanish. Every marketer would rush to Google’s first-party systems – Search, YouTube, Display – because they’d be the only places left where personalization and measurement still worked.
In other words, fixing privacy would have made Google’s dominance unavoidable. Killing off third-party cookies would have meant killing the competition.
That seems like it would be great for Google, but using Chrome to make it impossible for the rest of the ad industry to target customers would have just confirmed everyone’s worst fears about its power.
There is another reason, which is that hardly anyone really cared. Sure, they did at first. The idea that Google was going to eliminate cookies as a form of tracking seemed great for consumers. But, over time, as Google slowly backed off its plans, no one really made a big deal.
It turns out, most people just click “accept all cookies” to get to the next page. After a decade of headlines about data breaches and tracking scandals, the average user is numb.
We say we want control over our data, but really, we just use the internet without really thinking about it. Google figured that out long ago. It didn’t take much to see that the outrage had faded. Or, at least, to see that the outrage wasn’t actually reflected in the behavior of most users.
And, so, third-party cookies will stay. Chrome will keep talking about “user choice,” and advertisers will keep tracking people in slightly more polite ways.
Google, for its part, will keep doing what it does: printing money. It’s already the most successful advertising platform in the world. That’s because it has what is probably the single greatest business model in the history of the internet, and nothing about cookies was going to change that.
I used to think that Google decided that making the internet respect our privacy was too hard. It turns out, it just realized long ago that most people don’t think it’s actually worth caring about. – Inc./Tribune News Service
