We’re probably not going to find a solution to mass data mining by advertisers and others as long as privacy issues are handled in a siloed manner by the individual platforms.
Early last week Alphabet announced that it’s changed its mind and it’s not going to be barring third-party cookies from its Chrome browser after all. Sigh. This is something of a saga that goes back to 2020, when Google announced that eventually third-party cookies would be ignored by Chrome, which would pretty much make them irrelevant since Chrome is the most used browser on the planet with a user share of more than 65%.
After a couple of pushbacks on the timing, Google eventually decided that the phase out would begin in late 2024 and things seemed set.
But this is Google, where nothing is ever set in stone, and now there isn’t going to be a phase out of third-party cookies. Many consider this to be a bummer because folks with street smarts think that doing away with them will do much to solve the online privacy crisis.
According to Arun Kumar, a business advisor with the Consello Group, the street talk might be wrong however.
“Google shut off the cookies program not out of a desire to make advertising better for consumers or businesses, but in a desire to entrench their advertising monopoly,” he said in a statement issued shortly after Google’s change of plans were made public.
Kumar should know because he knows the advertising industry inside out. He spent more than six years as the chief data and marketing technology officer for Interpublic Group, one of the “big four” ad agencies.
From Google’s side, the notification came in a blog from Anthony Chavez, writing on the website for The Privacy Sandbox. According to him, Google isn’t so much doing an about-face on the third-party cookie ban; it’s just adjusting policy to put more power into the hands of folks using its Chrome browser.
“[W]e are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice,” said Chavez. “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.”
Users Not Happy; Advertisers Not Happy
Chavez is vice president of product management at Google as well as being a VP at The Privacy Sandbox, which is basically a feature built into Chrome to “both protect people’s privacy online and give companies and developers tools to build thriving digital businesses.” Its main feature — or at least the most well-known — is that it allows users to refuse to allow tracking cookies on their devices.
That’s not such a big deal. For years now, the GDPR has required websites wanting to do business in the European Union to make similar choices available to visitors to their sites. Most of us click through them all the time, with the same abandon as we click through EULAs.
According to Google, cancelling the killing of third-party cookies in Chrome was motivated by the results of a study it began conducting shortly after Privacy Sandbox reached general availability in September. That study indicated that websites and other platforms that depend on Google for advertising revenue (full disclosure — that includes FOSS Force) would see a significant revenue drop if the cookie ban were to be implemented.
“[R]emoving third-party cookies without enabling Privacy Sandbox led to -34% programmatic revenue for publishers on Google Ad Manager and -21% programmatic revenue for publishers on Google AdSense,” the company said, adding that if it continued to pass third-party tracking cookies on as normal while allowing Chrome users to disable them in Privacy Sandbox, publishers would see a much smaller revenue drop — -20% and -18% respectively — likely due to the opt-in nature of Privacy Sandbox, meaning most users would leave it at its default setting which allows cookies.
While Google’s reaction to the test results might seem reasonable at first blush, Kumar thinks that they should have been expected, and that they’re probably irrelevant at this stage of the game.
“The reality is that there is no effective replacement for third party cookies yet for publisher monetization,” he said in an email exchange with FOSS Force. “Once signals are obfuscated, it is logical to expect a decline in revenue in the short term. But please keep in mind that these numbers are results of campaigns that have been run with a lot of question marks around the technology itself.”
Kumar indicated that advertisers should look at some of the approaches that Google had already been examining and act accordingly. Other than that, there’s also the wait-and-see approach, which also might have much going for it.
“When you change models, there will be declines,” he said. “Most bid teams have not yet adjusted to a reduction in cookies; therefore, these numbers in my mind are meaningless. If after a year of running campaigns without third party cookies, we still see these results, they would be more credible.”
Competitive Advertisers Call Foul
Since Google first announced its plans for Chrome to eventually start blocking third-party cookies, Google has been coming under fire from others in the advertising industry who claim that simply doing away with tracking cookies would create an uneven playing field that would favor Google. With tracking cookies all but gone, Google’s competitors would no longer have the user data that they currently gather, while Google would still be able to collect all sorts of data through its browser.
In the UK, this led to the 2022 formation of Movement for an Open Web, a nonprofit organization tasked with “safeguarding a competitive and open internet,” with a membership that includes analytics companies, digital advertisers, publishers, and broadcasters. MOW, as it’s called, has filed a complaint with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over the plan.
The organization also seems to think that Google’s recent decision — keeping third-party cookies in play while allowing users to disable them through Privacy Sandbox — works better for the advertising industry as a whole than any plan that would ban cookies while allowing Google the opportunity to continue to collect online data through Chrome and its Android mobile operating system.
“We’ve long called for Privacy Sandbox to be allowed to compete on its merits,” James Rosewell, a co-founder at MOW said after last week’s announcement. “If advertisers prefer its approach, and consumers value the alleged privacy benefits, then it will be universally adopted. What wasn’t acceptable was for a solution like this to be forced on the market whilst removing any alternative choices.”
According to Kumar, online privacy protections remain fractured and siloed, making any kind of effective long term solution practically unreachable.
“It has always been obvious that Google would seek to benefit by seemingly adhering to privacy initiatives like the Privacy Sandbox,” he said. “It is also true that Apple has taken a pro-privacy position to aid their own business. Legislators and lawmakers have confused privacy with ideology as opposed to creating rigorous standards for privacy implementation. These situations wouldn’t arise if privacy standards didn’t differ by publisher or walled garden. Apple or Google shouldn’t be deciding how data gets consumed or transferred.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
