The surprise will further shock Chrome’s huge user base.
Google has unexpectedly announced that its long-awaited removal of Chrome’s dreaded tracking cookies has fallen through. The company has been struggling to reach an agreement with regulators to balance its own interests with those of the broader marketing industry, but no one expected this. Coming just days after Apple warned that Chrome was still lurking, the timing couldn’t be worse.
“We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice,” The company teased the news on July 22 before dropping its bombshell“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.”
But before you ask too many questions about what this means, we don’t know yet. It probably means you can choose between tracking cookies, Google’s semi-anonymous Topics API, and its semi-private navigationYou’ll be able to change your choice, which will apply to the entire web, at any time. But there’s still a catch: even that hasn’t been agreed yet. “We’re discussing this new path with regulators,” Google said, with the response from the UK CMA “We will have to carefully examine Google’s new approach.”
This is bad news for Chrome’s 3 billion users, most of whom will never change their settings and would be much better served by a more private browser by default. Apple’s attack ad on Chromedisguised as a pro-Safari promotion, which recreated scenes from Hitchcock’s The Birds to depict users being constantly spied on while browsing the web, before Safari came to the rescue.
Ironically, just hours before this shocking news, the EFF warned “Privacy Sandbox is Google’s way of allowing advertisers to continue targeting ads based on your online behavior, even after Chrome completes its long-awaited phaseout of third-party cookies.”
Google’s Privacy Sandbox program, which was intended to find a replacement for tracking cookies, appears to plagued by troubles since its creation with various false starts. The last iteration was to group users into like-minded groups, but Apple made its point clear in a WebKit Update He also issued statements alongside his attack ads saying that such a move would not prevent fingerprinting as promised.
“We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the ecosystem on the next phase of the journey to a more private web,” Google concluded in its announcement. But by keeping tracking cookies in place, while essentially admitting that its Plan B toward the ambitious goal of a more private web has failed, it risks sounding a bit hollow. Let’s not forget that Google’s Plan B promise The initiative to kill tracking cookies celebrated its fourth anniversary earlier this year.
The EFF warns that Google’s decision “underscores its continued commitment to profits over user privacy. Safari and Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020, when Google committed to doing the same. Third-party cookies are one of the most pervasive tracking technologies, allowing advertising companies and data brokers to collect and sell information about users’ online activities.”
You can expect a serious analysis of this story in the coming days.
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