Google Chrome is toss cookies from third parties forever. If all goes according to plan, future updates from the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it much harder to track the internet activity of billions of people. But it is not that simple. What seems like a huge victory for privacy can ultimately only strengthen Google’s grip on the advertising industry and the web as a whole.
Critics and regulators say the move could drive smaller advertising companies out of pocket and could hurt advertising-dependent websites to make money. To most people, the change will be invisible, but behind the scenes, Google intends to put Chrome in control of part of the advertising process. To do this, it intends to use a browser-based machine learning to record your browsing history and join people in groups with others with similar interests.
“They’re going to get rid of the infrastructure that enables individual detection and profiling on the Internet,” said Bennett Cyphers, a technologist for the Civil Liberties Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’re going to replace it with something that still makes targeted advertising possible – just in a different way.”
Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies comes from the Privacy Sandbox, a set of suggestions for improving online advertising without wiping out the advertising industry. Aside from removing third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox also addresses issues such as ad fraud, reduces the number of captchas people see, and introduces new ways for businesses to measure the performance of their ads. Many Google critics believe that some of the suggestions are an improvement on the existing set-up and that they are good for the Internet.
Change is needed. The online advertising industry is, to put it mildly, cumbersome. It contains billions of data points throughout our lives that are automatically traded every second of every day. Such a significant change to this system will affect a large number of businesses, from brands advertising online products and services to advertising techniques and news organizations driving these ads to every corner of the internet.
The Privacy Sandbox suggestions are complicated and technical. Google is already testing some, while others are in the development phase. Privacy Sandbox is documented online and Google has changed its plans based on feedback and counter-suggestions from opponents. But ultimately, as far as Chrome is concerned, everything is controlled 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. “It’s been the most intrusive technology in the world for some time.” When Google removes it in 2022, it will not be the first – but its large market share does mean that it will have the biggest impact. Apple’s Safari, the second largest browser behind Chrome, limited the tracking of cookies in 2017. Mozilla’s Firefox blocked third-party cookies in 2019; the problem is so big that the browser is currently blocking 10 billion trackers a day.
If you are currently using Chrome, the sites you visit will, with a few exceptions, add a third-party cookie to your device. These cookies, small snippets of code, are able to track your browsing history and thereby display ads. Third-party cookies send all the data they collect back to a different domain than the one you are currently on. First party cookies in comparison send data back to the owners of the domain you were visiting at the time.
Third-party cookies are the main reason why the shoes you looked at two weeks ago are still creeping up on the internet. All the data collected by third-party cookies is used to set up user profiles, which can include your interests, the things you buy and your behavior online, and it can be returned to cloudy data brokers. “The intention was really to start a certain set of suggestions on how older technologies, such as third-party cookies, as well as others, could be replaced by privacy-saving API alternatives,” says Chetna Bindra, a product leader in Google’s advertising industry.