Google no longer intends to drop support for third-party cookies, the online identifiers used by the advertising industry to track people and target them with ads based on their online activities.
In a post on Monday, Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, revealed that the search and ad giant realized that its five-year effort to build a privacy-preserving ad tech stack required a lot of work and had implications for online advertisers — some of who were adamant in their opposition.
“In light of this, we are proposing an updated approach that increases consumer choice,” Chavez wrote. “Instead of withdrawing third-party cookies, we will introduce a new Chrome experience that allows people to make informed choices that apply to their web browsing, and they can adjust those choices at any time.”
Privacy Sandbox – a set of APIs for conditionally protecting the privacy of online ad delivery and analytics – will co-exist with third-party cookies in Chrome for the foreseeable future.
And instead of phasing out support for third-party cookies in the Chrome browser next year — the subject of testing that began in January — Google intends to let Chrome users choose whether to play in its Privacy Sandbox or the neighboring surveillance land of data where third-party cookies support any type of information collection.
It remains to be seen whether Chrome’s interface for choosing between its Privacy Sandbox and traditional third-party cookies will be less confusing than the widely criticized “Enhanced ad privacy in Chrome” popup that announced the arrival of the Privacy Sandbox API in Chrome last year .
“This is a clear admission by Google that their plan to shut down the open web has failed,” said James Rosewell, co-founder of the Movement for the Open Web (MOW). “They aimed to remove the interoperability that allowed businesses to work together without interference from monopolists, but a combination of regulatory and industry pressures contributed to that.”
Google described its goal for the Privacy Sandbox years ago differently: “We want to find a solution that both really protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely available on the web,” claimed Justin Schuh, then Chrome’s director of engineering. .
But concerns raised by MOW and other critics of the ad industry were that Google’s Privacy Sandbox, in conjunction with the data signals it receives from logged-in Chrome users, would give it access to ad-relevant information that competitors don’t have access.
Google started working on its Privacy Sandbox project in 2019, around the time Apple and Mozilla (before it became an ad business) committed to protecting users against trackers and started blocking third-party cookies by default.
By 2021, Google’s plan has prompted an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), pushed by ad industry foes such as MOW. As a result of this investigation, in 2022 Google agreed to a set of commitments to welcome competition.
To further complicate matters, Google’s initial attempt to do without third-party cookies failed and failed to deliver the promised privacy. Technical setbacks and regulatory pressure have prompted Google to delay its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome.
Now it won’t happen at all.
The UK CMA announced it would not be publishing its quarterly Google compliance update at the end of the month, following the Chocolate Factory announcement, and invited interested parties to submit comments until 12 August.
“We stepped in and committed in 2022 because of concerns that Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could distort competition by causing ad spending to become even more concentrated in Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors,” explained a spokesperson for CMA.
“We will need to carefully consider Google’s new approach to the Privacy Sandbox, working closely with [Information Commissioner’s Office] in this regard, and I welcome views on Google’s revised approach – including possible implications for users and market outcomes.”
Lena Cohen, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation — an advocacy group that has consistently criticized the Privacy Sandbox proposal — bemoaned Google’s decision to back away from its retirement plan.
“This is an extremely disappointing decision that really highlights Google’s commitment to their own profits over user privacy,” Cohen said. The register.
“Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020, and Google has promised to do the same ever since. So I think this reversal, after years of delay, is just a consequence of their ad-driven business model that relies on pervasive user monitoring.”
Cohen noted that researchers and regulators have already found that the Privacy Sandbox failed to meet some of its own privacy goals. “Third-party cookies are an even more invasive form of online tracking than the Privacy Sandbox,” Cohen said.
“So the fact that the Privacy Sandbox did not allow enough online monitoring is quite worrying. It just goes to show that this ad ecosystem is driving really invasive collections of user information. That’s why the EFF has been advocating for years to ban behavioral advertising because that’s the kind of surveillance it encourages.”
Separately, Cohen wrote a statement to the EFF on Monday urging Chrome users to install the advocacy group’s Privacy Badger browser extension — to opt out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. ®
