Google halts its more than four-year plan to turn off tracking cookies by default in Chrome

Google announced today: It will not do something it has been thinking and toying with for a long time.

Most people who just use Chrome, rather than developing it or trying to serve ads to it, won’t know what it is.New Path to Privacy Sandbox on the Web“Maybe it means that. The very short version is that Google had a ‘path’, It was first announced in January 2020.Google has proposed several alternatives to the cookies that follow you from page to page, and constantly suggest you use that space heater you looked at three days ago. Each of these alternatives has been met with varying levels of resistance from privacy and open web advocates, commercial regulators, and the advertising industry.

So, instead of turning off third-party cookies by default and implementing new workarounds inside the Privacy Sandbox, Chrome will offer a “new experience” that lets users choose their tracking preferences when they update or first use Chrome. Google will also continue to work on its Privacy Sandbox APIs but in a way that recognizes “the impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.” Google also did not fail to mention that it is “discussing this new path with regulators.”

Why today? What does it really mean? Let’s look back over four and a half years of Google’s moves to replace third-party cookies, without seriously jeopardizing its position as the world’s largest ad provider.

2017–2022: FLoC or “What if Machines Tracked You, Not Cookies?”

Google’s big steps toward stopping likely started at Apple’s headquarters. Operating system updates in the fall of 2017 implemented a 24-hour time limit on ad-targeting cookies in Safari, the default browser on Macs and iOS devices. issued a strongly worded letter Some news sites opposed the change, saying it would “create friction between brands and their customers” and make advertising “more generic, less timely and useful.”

By the summer of 2019, Firefox is ready to Simply block tracking cookies by default.Google, which makes The vast majority of its money With online advertising, I made a different, broader argument against dropping third-party cookies. In other words: Trackers will track, and if we don’t give them a way to do it, they’ll do it the dirty way by fingerprinting browsers based on version numbers, fonts, screen size, and other identifiers. Google said it has some machine learning that can tell when third-party cookies are being dropped. good To share your browsing habits. For example:

New technologies such as federated learning Show that it’s possible for your browser to avoid detecting that you’re a member of a group that likes Beyoncé and sweaters so it can make sure the group contains thousands of other people.

In January 2020, Google changed its argument from “with” to “instead of” third-party cookies. Chrome engineering manager Justin Schuh wrote,Building a More Private Web: A Path to Making Third-Party Cookies Obsolete“, suggesting that broad support for privacy tools in Chrome would allow third-party cookies to be dropped entirely. Privacy advocate Ben Adida called the move “teeth-giving” and a “big deal.” Schuh wrote at the time that feedback from the W3C and others “gives us confidence that solutions in this area can work.”

As Google develops its own alternative to third-party cookies, the path has become more difficult and the space more dangerous. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has described Google’s FLoC, or “Federated Learning of Groups,” program that allows Chrome to automatically learn your profile for websites and ads, as “Terrible ideaMozilla, Apple, WordPress, DuckDuckGo, and several browsers based on Chrome’s Chromium core code have joined the EFF in opposing or not committing to FLoC. Google has postponed testing FLOC until late 2022 and removing third-party cookies (and thus implementing FLoC) until mid-2023.

By early 2022, FLoC had no path forward. Google turned to the Topics API, which would give users more control over Any topics (“Rock music,” “cars and vehicles”) would be passed on to potential advertisers. This would certainly outperform third-party cookies, which are largely unnameable and offer the user only one privacy policy: block them, or delete them all and lose a lot of login data.