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Google announced today that it will no longer be doing something it has been considering and refining for quite some time.
Most people who just use the Chrome browser and don’t develop for or try to serve ads to it probably don’t know what “a new path to a privacy sandbox on the web” means. In a nutshell, the “path” that Google first announced in January 2020 was to turn off third-party (i.e. tracking) cookies in the most used browser on the planet, bringing it on par with Safari, Firefox, and many others. Google has proposed several alternatives to cookies that follow users from page to page and constantly market to them about that space heater they saw three days ago. Each of these approaches has met with varying degrees of resistance from privacy and open web advocates, trade regulators, and the advertising industry.
So, rather than turning off third-party cookies by default and implementing a new solution within the Privacy Sandbox, Chrome will “introduce a new experience” that lets users choose their tracking preferences when they update or use Chrome for the first time. Google will also continue to develop the Privacy Sandbox API, but in a way that is aware of “the impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.” Google also made sure to note that it is “in discussions with regulators about this new direction.”
Why now? What does it actually mean? Let’s look back at Google’s efforts over the past four and a half years to replace the third-party cookie without seriously threatening its position as the world’s largest ad provider.
2017-2022: FLoC or “What if machines, not cookies, track you?”
The larger push to stop Google likely began at Apple headquarters, where a fall 2017 OS update imposed a 24-hour deadline on ad-targeting cookies in Safari, the default browser on Macs and iOS devices. A coalition of major advertising trade groups issued a strongly worded letter opposing the change, saying it would “drive a rift between brands and customers” and make ads “more generic, less timely and less useful.”
By the summer of 2019, Firefox was ready to block tracking cookies by default. Google, which makes most of its revenue from online advertising, made another broad argument against the end of third-party cookies. In other words, trackers will track you, and if you don’t provide them with a good way to do so, they’ll do so in a dirty way by fingerprinting your browser based on version numbers, fonts, screen size, and other identifiers. Google said it has machine learning that can determine when it’s appropriate to share your browsing habits. For example:
New technologies like federated learning could make it possible for browsers to avoid revealing that a user is a member of a group that likes Beyoncé and sweater vests until they are sure the group contains thousands of users.
In January 2020, Google shifted its focus from “in conjunction” to “instead” of third-party cookies. Chrome Engineering Director Justin Xu wrote “Building a more private web: a path to eliminate third-party cookies,” suggesting that widespread support for Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox tool could lead to a complete phase-out of third-party cookies. Privacy advocate Ben Adida called the move “stopping” and a “big deal.” Xu wrote at the time that feedback from the W3C and other stakeholders “gives us confidence that solutions in this space work.”
An explanatory graphic from Google about FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts).
As Google develops alternatives to third-party cookies, the road gets harder and the terrain more dangerous. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google’s FLoC, or “federated learning of cohorts,” which allows Chrome to use machine learning to profile sites and ads, a “terrible idea.” EFF was joined by Mozilla, Apple, WordPress, DuckDuckGo, and many browsers based on Chrome’s core Chromium code in either opposing FLoC or staying out of it. Google has delayed testing FLoC until late 2022 and removing third-party cookies (and implementing FLoC) until mid-2023.
By early 2022, FLoC had no way forward. Google pivoted to the Topics API, which gives users a bit more control over which topics (“rock music”, “cars”) get forwarded to potential advertisers. This would certainly be an improvement over third-party cookies, which have nearly indecipherable names and only offer users one privacy policy to block or delete them all and lose a lot of logins.
