Today, we’re sharing the latest on the Privacy Sandbox initiative including a timeline for Chrome’s plan to phase out support for third-party cookies. While there’s considerable progress with this initiative, it’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right.
[…]We plan to continue to work with the web community to create more private approaches to key areas, including ad measurement, delivering relevant ads and content, and fraud detection. Today, Chrome and others have offered more than 30 proposals, and four of those proposals are available in origin trials. For Chrome, specifically, our goal is to have the key technologies deployed by late 2022 for the developer community to start adopting them. Subject to our engagement with the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and in line with the commitments we have offered, Chrome could then phase out third-party cookies over a three month period, starting in mid-2023 and ending in late 2023.
Chrome is, for some reason, the most popular browser in the world, and it sucks that Google has to delay ending support for third-party cookies. This is the price they pay for being as big and powerful as they are, since while cutting off third-party cookies won’t harm Google’s advertising business all that much, it certainly will harm the very few remaining competitors it still has. I won’t shed a single tear for any online advertising company, but I will shed a tear for the masses who still believe they’re hogtied by Chrome.
I’m conflicted on this. In one sense this is a loss for privacy because it means Chrome users will still be intimately tracked across the Web with barely any restraint using cookies. On the other hand it’s a win for privacy, because invasive tracking won’t be masked under the guise of a Privacy Sandbox.
I didn’t check all thirty of the proposals but FLoC at least, while being better than cookies, still seemed to get many things wrong. The problem is inherent in behavioural advertising rather than the method used to collect the data for it.
flypig,
Third party cookies are very invasive and it’s regrettable netscape enabled them by default all those years back.
While one could create a custom configuration to disable them, when I set out to do this several years ago it actually broke tons of functionality that was built around 3rd tracking cookies in ways that were rather unexpected. For better or worse my bank’s authentication happens across domains and breaks if you block “3rd party cookies”. So because I couldn’t automatically distinguish between 3rd party cookies that were used by 3rd parties and those that were used by primary parties. it became apparent that these “3rd party cookies” would have to be allowed or denied on a case by case basis which was a hassle.
A bigger problem arises when websites have deep rooted dependencies on 3rd parties. Sometimes blocking these 3rd parties is easy and inconsequential, like facebook’s like buttons, other times it’s more annoying that things are missing like discord comments. The worst are those that create an outright denial of service, like google captchas.
I find it ironic that google is actually one of the notoriously guilty parties for the behavior that chrome is trying to phase out.