Google backs down on plan to eliminate third-party cookies

In 2020, Google planned to make third-party cookies obsolete, essentially making first-party cookies obsolete with what it called Privacy Sandbox. The feature was touted by the tech company as a breakthrough for user privacy while also allowing publishers and ad buyers to goal ads to consumers and perform some measurement tasks within the background. Google has somewhat backed away from these original plans On July 22, the corporate posted a blog post saying it could proceed to support third-party cookies because its solution was not yet ready to be released.

According to a Google blog post: “Early testing by ad tech companies, including Google, has shown that Privacy Sandbox APIs have the potential to achieve these results. We expect the overall performance of using Privacy Sandbox APIs to improve over time as industry adoption increases. At the same time, we recognize that this change requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.”

The company continued: “Accordingly, we are proposing an updated approach that increases user choice. Instead of phasing out third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that allows people to make informed choices about how they browse the web, and they can adjust that choice at any time. We are discussing this new path with regulators and will work with the industry as we implement it.”

According to , the partners Google referenced in a blog post by Anthony Chavez, Vice President of Privacy Sandbox, who expressed concerns that Google’s feature wasn’t ready for release yet. Index Exchange, a Google grant program participant created to test Privacy Sandbox, published its own blog post on July 2, detailing the problems it saw with Google’s innovation. “With its current limitations, Privacy Sandbox may not yet be an effective solution for widespread use, or it may be too expensive for technology companies to prepare their implementations for general availability. There are significant risks to publishers and the software ecosystem that we must address to make scaling easier and more efficient.”

They continued by detailing how Google’s requirements lead to latency issues: “This latency is primarily due to the requirement for Google to be the top seller in the PA auctions, which in turn requires all non-Google bids to be processed by Google Ad Manager (GAM) before the auction begins. All auction participants must also wait for Google to finalize the winning bid. Latency can be reduced by allowing other publishers and ad exchanges to compete directly in the client-side auction via Prebid. This would create a more level playing field and significantly speed up online transactions.”

According to , the Google feature was blocked due to a CMA grievance filed by the Open Network Movementad industry group. According to the group’s co-founder, James Rosewell, “We have long advocated for Privacy Sandbox to be allowed to compete on its own merits. If advertisers prefer this approach and consumers value its purported privacy benefits, it will be widely adopted. It was unacceptable for such a solution to be forced upon the market while removing all alternative choices.”

In 2021 criticized Google’s program for instance of “privacy theater.” Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, is meant to hide users in groups of comparable interests. But Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher and former chief technologist on the Federal Trade Commission, said Google’s FLoC project and its proposal don’t solve the issue of surveillance capitalism. Instead, they leave your entire ecosystem and its problems intact. “It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of surveillance capitalism,” Soltani said. “It still encourages the exchange of personal data. It still encourages the collection of personal data. All of that remains unchanged. The externalities associated with things like clickbait or around things like controversial content to generate more clicks and views, disinformation — all of those questions are still there and untouched.”