Last week, Google backtracked on its long-standing promise to block third-party cookies in Chrome. This is bad for your privacy and good for Google’s business. Third-party cookies are a pervasive tracking technology that allow companies to snoop on your online activity for surveillance and ad-targeting purposes. The consumer harm caused by these cookies has been well-documented for years, prompting Safari and Firefox to block them since 2020. Google knows this—that’s why they pledged to phase out third-party cookies in 2020. By abandoning this plan, Google leaves billions of Chrome users vulnerable to online surveillance.
How do third-party cookies facilitate online surveillance?
Cookies are small packets of information stored in your browser by websites you visit. They were built to enable useful functionality, like letting a website remember your language preferences or the contents of your shopping cart. But for years, companies have abused this functionality to track user behavior across the web, fueling a vast network of online surveillance.
While first-party cookies enable useful functionality, third-party cookies are primarily used for online tracking. Third-party cookies are set by websites other than the one you’re currently viewing. Websites often include code from third-party companies to load resources like ads, analytics, and social media buttons. When you visit a website, this third-party code can create a cookie with a unique identifier for you. When you visit another website that loads resources from the same third-party company, that company receives your unique identifier from the cookie they previously set. By recognizing your unique identifier across multiple sites, third-party companies build a detailed profile of your browsing habits.
For example, if you visit WebMD’s “HIV & AIDS Resource Center,” you might expect WebMD to get information about your visit to their page. What you probably don’t expect, and what third-party cookies enable, is that your visit to WebMD is tracked by dozens of companies you’ve never heard of. At the time of writing, visiting WebMD’s “HIV & AIDS Resource Center” sets 257 third-party cookies on your browser. The businesses that set those cookies include big tech companies (Google, Amazon, X, Microsoft) and data brokers (Lotame, LiveRamp, Experian). By setting a cookie on WebMD, these companies can link your visit to WebMD to your activity on other websites.
How does this online surveillance harm consumers?
Third-party cookies allow companies to build detailed profiles of your online activities, which can be used for targeted advertising or sold to the highest bidder. The consequences are far-reaching and deeply concerning. Your browsing history can reveal sensitive information, including your financial status, sexual orientation, and medical conditions. Data brokers collect and sell this information without your knowledge or consent. Once your data is for sale, anyone can buy it. Purchasers include insurance companies, hedge funds, scammers, anti-abortion groups, stalkers, and government agencies such as the military, FBI, and ICE.
Online surveillance tools built for advertisers are exploited by others. For example, the NSA used third-party cookies set by Google to identify targets for hacking and people attempting to remain anonymous online. Likewise, a conservative Catholic nonprofit paid data brokers millions to identify priests using gay dating apps, and the brokers obtained this information from online advertising systems.
Targeted ads also hurt us. They enable predatory advertisers to target vulnerable groups, like payday lenders targeting people in financial trouble. They also facilitate discriminatory advertising, like landlords targeting housing ads by race.
Yet again, Google puts profits over privacy
Google’s decision to continue allowing third-party cookies, despite overwhelming evidence of their surveillance harms, is a direct consequence of their advertising-driven business model. Google makes most of its money from tracker-driven, behaviorally-targeted ads.
If Google wanted, Chrome could do much more to protect your privacy. Other major browsers, like Safari and Firefox, provide significantly more protection against online tracking by default. Notably, Google is the internet’s biggest tracker, and most of the websites you visit include Google trackers (including but not limited to third-party cookies). As Chrome leaves users vulnerable to tracking, Google continues to receive nearly 80% of their revenue from online advertising.
Google’s change in plans follows concerns from advertisers and regulators that the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome would harm competition in digital advertising. Google’s anti-competitive practices in the ad-tech industry must be addressed, but maintaining online surveillance systems is not the answer. Instead, we should focus on addressing the root of these competition concerns. The bipartisan AMERICA Act, which proposed breaking up vertically integrated ad-tech giants like Google, offers a more effective approach. We don’t need to sacrifice user privacy to foster a competitive digital marketplace.
What now?
First, we call on Google to reverse this harmful decision. Continuing to allow one of the most pervasive forms of online tracking, especially when other major browsers have blocked it for years, is a clear betrayal of user trust. Google must prioritize people’s privacy over their advertising revenue and find real solutions to competition concerns.
In the meantime, users can take steps to protect themselves from online tracking. Installing Privacy Badger can help block third-party cookies and other forms of online tracking.
We also need robust privacy legislation to ensure that privacy standards aren’t set by advertising companies. Companies use various tracking methods, like fingerprinting and link redirection, to monitor users across the web without third-party cookies. As long as it remains legal and profitable, companies will continue building and selling profiles of your online activities. Already, Google has developed alternative tracking tools that may be less invasive than third-party cookies but still enable harmful surveillance. Blocking third-party cookies is important but insufficient to address pervasive online tracking. Strong privacy legislation in the United States is possible, necessary, and long overdue. A comprehensive data privacy law should protect our browsing history by default and ban behavioral ads, which drive excessive data collection.
Google’s decision to continue allowing third-party cookies in Chrome is a major disappointment. Browsing the internet shouldn’t require submitting to extensive surveillance. As Google prioritizes profits over privacy, we need legislation that gives you control over your data.