In a shock move, Google abruptly confirmed on Monday that its long-awaited killing of Chrome’s dreaded tracking cookies has just crashed and burned. The company was struggling to agree on an approach with regulators that balanced its own interests with those of the wider marketing industry—but no one expected this.
“We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice,” the company teased on July 22, before dropping its bombshell. “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.”
But before you ask too many questions as to what that means, we don’t yet know. It likely means you can choose between tracking cookies, Google’s semi-anonymous Topics API, and its semi-private browsing. You’ll be able to change your choice—which will apply across the web—at any time. But there’s still a catch—even this isn’t yet agreed. “We're discussing this new path with regulators,” Google said, with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority replying “we will need to carefully consider Google’s new approach.”
This is bad news for Chrome’s 3 billion users, most of whom will never change their settings and would be much better served by a browser that’s more private by default. This was the focus of Apple’s not-so-subtle attack ad on Chrome, dressed up as a pro-Safari promotion, which recreated scenes from Hitchcock’s The Birds to depict users being spied upon as they browse the web, before Safari comes to the rescue.
Ironically, just hours before this shock news, EFF warned that “Privacy Sandbox is Google’s way of letting advertisers keep targeting ads based on your online behavior, even after Chrome completes its long overdue phaseout of third-party cookies.”
Google’s Privacy Sandbox program, which was intended to find a replacement for tracking cookies, has seemed plagued since its inception with various false starts. The latest iteration has been the collation of users into like-minded groups, but Apple made its view clear in a WebKit update released alongside its attack ads that such a move would not prevent digital fingerprinting as promised.
“We look forward to continued collaboration with the ecosystem on the next phase of the journey to a more private web,” Google signed off its announcement. But its decision to keep tracking cookies in place, while admitting that plan B toward the goal of a more private web has failed, risks sounding hollow. Let’s not forget, Google’s promise to kill tracking cookies celebrated its fourth birthday earlier this year.
EFF warns that Google’s decision “underscores their ongoing commitment to profits over user privacy. Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020, when Google pledged to do the same. Third-party cookies are one of the most pervasive tracking technologies, enabling advertising companies and data brokers to collect and sell information about users’ online activities.”
You can expect serious analysis of this story over the coming days.
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