Google has no plans to drop support for third-party cookies, online identifiers used by the advertising industry to track users and target them with ads based on their online activities.
In a post published Monday, Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, revealed that the search and advertising giant has come to understand that its five-year effort to build a privacy-preserving ad tech stack requires a lot of work and has implications for online advertisers — some of whom have been fiercely opposed.
“In light of this, we’re proposing an updated approach that expands user choice,” Chavez wrote. “Instead of removing third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that allows users to make an informed choice that applies to their entire web browsing experience, and they would be able to adjust that choice at any time.”
The Privacy Sandbox, a suite of APIs for serving and analyzing online ads that theoretically protect privacy, will coexist alongside third-party cookies in Chrome for the foreseeable future.
And instead of phasing out support for third-party cookies in the Chrome browser next year — subject to testing that began in January — Google intends to let Chrome users choose whether to play in its Privacy Sandbox or in the adjacent realm of data surveillance, where third-party cookies support all sorts of information collection.
It remains to be seen whether Chrome’s interface for choosing between its Privacy Sandbox and traditional third-party cookies will be any less confusing than the widely criticized “Enhanced ad privacy in Chrome” pop-up that announced the arrival of the Privacy Sandbox APIs in Chrome last year.
“Google clearly recognizes that its plan to lock down the open web has failed,” said James Rosewell, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web (MOW). “Its goal was to eliminate the interoperability that allowed companies to work together without interference from monopolists, but a combination of regulatory and industry pressures has ended that plan.”
Google described its goal for the Privacy Sandbox years ago, in different terms: “We want to find a solution that truly protects user privacy and also helps content remain freely accessible on the web,” said Justin Schuh, then Chrome’s director of engineering.
But the concern raised by MOW and other ad industry critics was that Google’s Privacy Sandbox, in conjunction with the data signals it receives from logged-in Chrome users, would give it access to advertising-relevant information that its competitors couldn’t.
Google began work on its Privacy Sandbox project in 2019, around the time Apple and Mozilla (before it also became an ad company) committed to protecting users from trackers and began blocking third-party cookies by default.
In 2021, Google’s plan was investigated by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), encouraged by ad industry opponents like MOW. Following that investigation, Google agreed to a set of commitments in 2022 aimed at promoting competition.
To complicate matters further, Google’s first attempt to do away with third-party cookies failed to deliver on the privacy it promised. Technical difficulties and regulatory pressure led Google to delay its plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome.
Now this will not happen at all.
The UK CMA has announced that it will not publish its quarterly update on Google’s compliance at the end of the month following the Chocolate Factory announcement, and has invited interested parties to submit comments by 12 August.
“We intervened and put in place commitments in 2022 because of concerns that Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could distort competition by causing advertising spend to be further concentrated in Google’s ecosystem to the detriment of its competitors,” a CMA spokesperson said.
“We will need to carefully review Google’s new approach to Privacy Sandbox, working closely with the [Information Commissioner’s Office] In this regard, we welcome views on Google’s revised approach, including possible implications for consumers and market outcomes.
Lena Cohen, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation — an advocacy group that has regularly criticized the Privacy Sandbox proposal — lamented Google’s decision to abandon its deprecation plan.
“This is an extremely disappointing decision that only underscores Google’s commitment to prioritizing its own profits over user privacy,” Cohen said. The register.
“Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020, and Google has since committed to doing the same. So I think this turnaround, after years of delay, is just a consequence of their ad-driven business model, which relies on pervasive user surveillance.”
Cohen noted that researchers and regulators have already found that Privacy Sandbox falls short of some of its own privacy goals. “Third-party cookies are an even more invasive form of online tracking than Privacy Sandbox,” Cohen said.
“The fact that Privacy Sandbox has not allowed for sufficient online surveillance is quite alarming. It just shows that this advertising ecosystem is encouraging really invasive user information collection. That’s why EFF has been advocating for years for a behavioral advertising ban, because that’s the kind of surveillance it encourages.”
Separately, Cohen penned an EFF statement Monday urging Chrome users to install the advocacy group’s Privacy Badger browser extension — to opt out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox. ®
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