Google no longer plans to stop supporting third-party cookies, online identifiers used by the advertising industry to track people and target ads based on their online activities.
Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, said in a post on Monday that the search and advertising giant understands that its five-year effort to build a privacy-preserving ad tech stack will require significant effort and will have an impact on online advertisers, some of whom are staunchly opposed.
“With this in mind, we are proposing a new approach to empowering users with choice,” Chavez wrote. “Instead of eliminating third-party cookies, we want to introduce a new experience in Chrome that gives users the power to make informed choices that apply across their web browsing, and adjust those choices at any time.”
The Privacy Sandbox, a conceptually privacy-preserving suite of APIs for online ad serving and analytics, will coexist alongside third-party cookies in Chrome for the time being.
And rather than gradually phasing out support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser next year, following tests it began in January, Google plans to let Chrome users choose whether they want to play in the Privacy Sandbox or the adjacent realm of data surveillance, where third-party cookies support all kinds of information collection.
It remains to be seen whether Chrome’s interface for choosing between the Privacy Sandbox and traditional third-party cookies will be more confusing than the widely criticized “Enhanced Ad Privacy in Chrome” popup that heralded the introduction of the Privacy Sandbox API in Chrome last year.
“This is a clear admission that Google’s plan to shut down the open web has failed,” asserted James Rosewell, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web (MOW). “Their goal was to eliminate interoperability, which allows companies to work together without interference from monopolies, but regulation and industry pressure prevented that from happening.”
Google described the goals of the Privacy Sandbox in different terms a few years ago: “We want to find a solution that really protects users’ privacy while still allowing them to freely access content on the web,” Justin Schuh, then Chrome’s engineering director, argued.
But a concern raised by MOW and other advertising industry critics was that Google’s Privacy Sandbox, combined with data signals it obtains from logged-in Chrome users, would give Google access to advertising-related information that its competitors don’t have access to.
Google began working on the Privacy Sandbox project in 2019, around the same time that Apple and Mozilla (also before they were in the advertising business) committed to protecting users from trackers and began blocking third-party cookies by default.
By 2021, Google’s plans had prompted an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) at the urging of ad industry ad foes like MOW. That investigation resulted in Google agreeing to a set of commitments in 2022 to address competition.
To further complicate things, Google’s initial attempts to phase out third-party cookies fell short and failed to deliver on the privacy promises it made: technical issues and regulatory pressure led Google to postpone plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome.
Now that doesn’t happen at all.
Following the Chocolate Factory disclosure, the UK’s CMA said it would not publish a quarterly update on Google’s compliance later this month, and invited interested parties to submit comments by August 12.
“We intervened and took action in 2022 due to concerns that Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could further concentrate advertising spend in the Google ecosystem at the expense of competitors, distorting competition,” a CMA spokesperson explained.
“We need to carefully consider Google’s new approach to the Privacy Sandbox and will work closely with the (Information Commissioner’s Office) on this, and welcome their views on Google’s revised approach, including its potential impact on consumer and market outcomes.”
Lena Cohen, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that has consistently criticized the Privacy Sandbox proposal, lamented Google’s decision to backtrack on its deprecation plans.
“This is an extremely disappointing decision and only highlights Google’s willingness to put its own profits above the privacy of its users,” Cohen told The Register.
“Safari and Firefox have been blocking third-party cookies by default since 2020, and Google has promised to do the same since then, so I think this policy reversal after several years of delay is simply the result of an ad-driven business model that relies on pervasive user surveillance.”
Cohen noted that researchers and regulators have already found that the Privacy Sandbox has failed to achieve some of its privacy goals. “Third-party cookies are an even more intrusive form of online tracking than the Privacy Sandbox,” Cohen said.
“The fact that Privacy Sandbox did not enable sufficient online surveillance is deeply disturbing. It shows that this advertising ecosystem encourages the highly intrusive collection of user information. The reason EFF has long advocated for a ban on behavioral advertising is because this is the type of surveillance it encourages.”
Meanwhile, Cohen released the EFF’s statement on Monday, urging Chrome users to install the advocacy group’s browser extension, Privacy Badger, to opt out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
