Google Extends Support for Tracking Party Cookies Until 2023

Google’s sweeping proposals to deprecate third-party cookies in
Chrome browser is going back to the drawing board after the company
announced plans to delay the rollout from early 2022 to late 2023,
pushing back the project by nearly two years.

“While there’s considerable progress^[1]
with this initiative, it’s become clear that more time is needed
across the ecosystem to get this right,” Chrome’s Privacy
Engineering Director, Vinay Goel, said^[2]
Thursday.

In buying extra time, the search giant said it hopes to arrive
at a consensus on the right solutions, while simultaneously
engaging with regulators, and enabling publishers and the
advertising industry to migrate their services to
privacy-preserving technologies that prevent “alternative forms of
individual tracking, and discourage the rise of covert approaches
like fingerprinting^[3].”

The revised timelines comes close on the heels of a fresh
regulatory setback in the European Union, after the European
Commission opened a wide-ranging
investigation^[4]
into Google’s digital advertising business to examine its “plans to
prohibit the placement of third party ‘cookies’ on Chrome and
replace them with the ‘Privacy Sandbox’ set of tools,” and assess
its “effects on online display advertising and online display
advertising intermediation markets.”

In a similar move, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority
(CMA) separately earlier this month announced that it’s taking up a
“role in the design and development of Google’s Privacy Sandbox
proposals to ensure they do not distort competition.”

Third-party tracking cookies have emerged as a point of privacy
concern as the technology enables marketers and ad platforms to
monitor user activity online as they hop from one website to the
other for purposes of behavioral targeting^[5]. Apple’s Safari and
Mozilla’s Firefox already block them by default.

Announced in January 2020, Google’s Privacy Sandbox^[6]
aims to retire support for third-party cookies in Chrome with an
alternative tool called Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka FLoC^[7]) that combines
aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing, and other
privacy-preserving technologies to classify users into cohorts
based on their interests, which can then be used by the ad tech
industry to tailor ads.

But the company’s ad tech overhaul has run into a number of
potential concerns^[8], with Mozilla noting^[9]
that “the current design has a number of privacy properties that
could create significant risks if it were to be widely deployed in
its current form.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called
it a “terrible idea^[10]” that creates new
privacy risks.

Adding to Google’s woes, no other browser maker has committed to
using FLoC, including those that are based on the open-source
Chromium codebase such as Brave^[11], Microsoft Edge, Opera,
and Vivaldi^[12]. What’s more, an
analysis from Digiday^[13] this month found that
Amazon is actively blocking the cookieless tracking system from
“gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research”
across its namesake website, WholeFoods, Zappos, ShopBop, and
Goodreads.

If anything, Google is in an unenviable position of having to
balance demands for stronger user-privacy protections vis-à-vis its
dominant role in multiple businesses — search, ad tech, and web
browser — in the process, pitting these conflicting incentives
against one other, and drawing the ire of privacy advocates,
regulators, publishers, and advertisers alike.

“We believe that the Privacy Sandbox will provide the best
privacy protections for everyone. By ensuring that the ecosystem
can support their businesses without tracking individuals across
the web, we can all ensure that free access to content continues,”
Goel said.

“And because of the importance of this mission, we must take
time to evaluate the new technologies, gather feedback and iterate
to ensure they meet our goals for both privacy and performance, and
give all developers time to follow the best path for privacy,” he
added.