No news is sometimes bad news
Forget iPhone 16 and iOS 18, perhaps the most impressive thing to come from Apple this year will be its unnerving sense of timing. No sooner had its remake of The Birds been aired, publicly attacking Google Chrome in all but name, than Chrome hit its 3 billion users with a shock cookie revival. As one headline put it: “Google’s latest privacy changes in Chrome prove Apple’s nightmare ad is all too real.”
The real issue for those 3 billion users is timing—or lack thereof. Google had planned to replace cookies with anonymized tracking alternatives—likeminded groups and the like. But those alternative options were hit by regulatory concerns around damage to the wider industry and privacy concerns around whether they’d actually work.
Despite its delays, the deprecation (aka killing) of Chrome’s tracking cookies was a forcing function for their replacement, the haphazard Privacy Sandbox. With cookies reprieved, the can has been kicked well down the road. And while tracking optionality along the lines of Apple’s ATT sounds good, it’s currently nowhere in sight.
Cue Google’s Alex Cone, Privacy Sandbox’s product manager, who told a virtual industry panel on Friday that “we’re at work on those [new] designs, and we’ll discuss those with regulators as we advance… there’s no new information to provide.”
And as for the timeline for expanding the Privacy Sandbox—which should now run in parallel with cookies—beyond the pilot 1%, “we have not shared a timeline around any sort of ramp-up,” Cone said. “No new information to share on that.”
Put more simply, there is currently no fix for a tracking “nightmare” that’s now very real for Chrome users that has been designed by Google and approved by regulators, and designing and launching such a fix is not fully in Google’s control. Which means no update on what’s coming or when it’s coming—at all.
Cone’s comments were reported by Ad Exchanger, which also noted that “the Privacy Sandbox may serve as a cookie alternative, but Google asserts it was never meant to be a substitute for cookies. Therefore, Chrome cookie deprecation and Chrome Privacy Sandbox adoption were never actually dependent on each other. (Regulators and most of the ad industry may beg to differ.)”
And so, whereas before we had a situation where the discussions between Google and the likes of the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) were taking place against that backdrop of a target cookie killing date, now it’s open-ended. And until such a time as there’s any change, the tracking industry will just carry on as before.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room. Notwithstanding its inherent design issues, the Privacy Sandbox was seen as a firm plan to replace cookies, a shift from one form of tracking to another. And there was a target date—a regularly missed date, but a date nonetheless. Now, instead, we have a much more abstract debate with regulators on user choice and whether Google’s asymmetric information on its user base means their selecting “don’t track” advantages Google at the expense of the ad industry, in much the same way as feared with Privacy Sandbox.
“We will need to carefully consider Google’s new approach,” the CMA said in response to Google’s update. “We welcome views on Google’s revised approach, including possible implications for consumers and market outcomes.”
CMA’s remit is to balance Google’s business with the rest of the industry—users will still be tracked, it’s just the how that’s up for debate. Which is why EFF warns it has “argued for years that the targeting of ads based on people’s online behavior should be banned. Behavioral advertising incentivizes all online actors to use tracking technology, like third-party cookies, to collect as much of our information as possible. We need robust privacy legislation in the United States to ensure that privacy standards aren’t set by advertising companies like Google.”
The challenge for Chrome users is that advertisers and the tracking industry were well advanced assessing alternatives to cookies given deprecation. The sound of gears cranking into reverse could be heard right across the web just minutes Google’s news. As Ad Exchanger says, “deprecation was the forcing mechanism for Sandbox adoption. If third-party cookies remain widely available, advertisers, ad tech and publishers won’t rebuild their online advertising infrastructure.”
Which for users means a major retrench and no likelihood of any meaningful change anytime soon. Meanwhile, “your browsing is being watched,” as Apple would say.