After 4 years of striking fear into the hearts of ad tech companies and advertisers everywhere, Google has abandoned the quest to kill off third-party cookies.
n January 2020 Google told the world they were going to kill off support for 3rd party cookies in the Chrome browser by 2022. At the time Firefox and Safari were making big pushes into privacy in the wake of California passing the CCPA regulations effective the first of January, and almost 18 months after Europe adopted GDPR privacy rules. Google, the largest browser company AND the largest digital advertising platform on the planet had to address the elephant in the room. So they came up with FLoC–Federated Learning of Cohorts. Rolls right off the tongue. FLoC was going to make cookies obsolete and advertisers were scrambling to understand how it would all work.
Well evidently so was Google, because quietly in late January 2022 they killed it and replaced it with something they called Topics API. Basically Topics API was a taxonomy of, well, 300 topics that Google created to organize how users browse the web and based on those topics Google would serve up ads. And they toiled away building out their Topics API through 2023, when it rolled out into general release as part of the Chrome browser experience. However, noticeably, 3rd party cookies still exist. So what gives?
All of the privacy efforts were organized under a rubric Google called the “privacy sandbox” whose purpose is to support and test the various efforts Google engages in to achieve a balance between the interests of advertisers and the privacy interests of web users. The privacy sandbox website is geared towards developers who want to understand the mechanics of how you serve ads that are relevant to a user but maintain that user’s privacy. According to Google they “will phase out third-party cookies by using the latest privacy techniques, like differential privacy (sharing interests without revealing identity), k-anonymity, and on-device processing.” All technobabble to the layperson, but to developers it was an alternative to cookies.
But did it work? Well on July 22, 2024, Google surprised the ad tech world by abandoning its effort to kill third-party cookies. In Google’s own words “We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content…[editing out a whole bunch of stuff]…in light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice.” OK, not clear what that means, but the next sentence reveals some more details.
“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.”
So third-party cookies won’t be killed off and a yet-to-be-determined method of choosing how you want “to be tracked” will be rolled out at some point after they’ve cleared it with regulators, advertisers and publishers.
Sounds a lot like cookie consent management, but at the browser level and not the site level. Oh, and there already are tools in the chrome privacy settings tab to let you do most of what it sounds like they’re talking about.
So there you have it. After 4 years of fear-mongering and leading the ad tech industry down the garden path toward a cookieless future, cookies are here to stay. I think we all know why Google isn’t killing third-party cookies. IF they did, it would have killed their biggest revenue stream. They simply can’t make the ecosystem work without tracking technology.
I think I’ll have a Double Stuff Oreo to celebrate.
For more in-depth reading, check out the following:
https://mashable.com/article/google-backtracks-on-killing-cookies
https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/news/privacy-sandbox-update
https://adtechexplained.com/why-is-google-no-longer-deprecating-cookies
https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/first-party-mode-google-tags
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/25/google-kills-off-floc-replaces-it-with-topics/
https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/first-party-mode-google-tags
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/25/google-kills-off-floc-replaces-it-with-topics/
