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.
on monday postAnthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, said the search and advertising giant realized that the five-year effort to build a privacy-preserving ad tech stack would require a lot of work and would have an impact on online advertisers, some of whom are staunchly opposed.
“With this in mind, we propose a new approach that gives users more choice,” Chavez wrote. “Instead of eliminating third-party cookies, we’re introducing a new experience in Chrome that gives users the power to make informed choices that apply across their web browsing, and lets them adjust those choices at any time.”
of 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 foreseeable future.
And instead Phased out Support for third-party cookies is expected to be rolled out to the Chrome browser next year, but it will depend on the results of testing. Starts 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 Privacy Sandbox and traditional third-party cookies will be less confusing than the widely criticized “Extend Ad Privacy for Chrome” popup. Announced the arrival Last year, Chrome introduced the Privacy Sandbox API.
“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 Started working When we started the Privacy Sandbox project in 2019, apple and Mozilla (before that It also became an advertising business.) has promised to protect users from trackers and has begun blocking third-party cookies by default.
By 2021, Google plans to investigation This comes as a result of an investigation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), at the urging of advertising industry adversaries such as MOW, which led to Google agreeing to a series of commitments to address competition in 2022.
Further complicating the issue are Google’s initial attempts to move away from third-party cookies. It wasn’t enough and Could not provide Privacy promised: Due to technical issues and regulatory pressure, Google has postponed 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 have carefully considered Google’s new approach to Privacy Sandbox, [Information Commissioner’s Office] In this regard, we welcome input on our revised approach, including its impact on consumers and the marketplace.”
Lena Cohen, a staff scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has consistently Criticizing the Privacy Sandbox proposal – lamented Google’s decision to reverse its deprecation plans.
“This is an incredibly disappointing decision and only highlights Google’s willingness to put its own profits above the privacy of its users,” Cohen said. Registry.
“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.”
Cohen wrote for EFF. statement On Monday, Chrome users were urged to install the advocacy group’s Privacy Badger browser extension to opt out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
