No news is sometimes bad news
Updated August 1 with new industry feedback on Google’s tracking reversal.
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.”
This lack of news and timeline is serious. Digiday has just reported on early industry feedback “since the latest twist in Google’s seemingly never ending plan for third-party cookies in Chrome;” Google execs, it says, are now “in full-on damage control mode, trying to soothe everyone’s nerves, both publicly and behind the scenes.”
Even expanding the current Privacy Sandbox pilot beyond its minuscule 1% of users is not yet firming up. “We have not shared a timeline around any sort of ramp-up,” Cone acknowledged. “No new information to share on that.”
“It’s hard not to feel like you’re a ball of yarn being played with by a cat,” one CEO told Digiday, “when the ad tech industry is completely at the whims of Google.”
According to Digiday, “comments like this have been the norm over the last week… Google execs have been trying to placate everyone as best they can. They’ve met with execs, held forums, and even participated in panels to field questions and calm the storm. They even attended a meeting described as a war room by one attendee, where Google execs heard grievances from various parts of the ecosystem.”
But the situation is stark. There is currently no fix for this tracking “nightmare.” As much as Google try to pain a picture of calm engagement with the industry, the reports making progress—including this latest from Digiday suggest otherwise.
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.”
And if Google is indeed moving down Apple’s App Tracking Transparency route, we will soon see very real fear of the unknown—this could be much worse than updating cookies with something more privacy-centric. Apple user opt-in rates are dire.
“Sure, [users] can tweak that choice anytime,” Digiday says, “but let’s be honest, the odds are slim. For Apple, opt-in rates hover between 12% to 40% depending on the app category, according to Business of Apps. Should Google follow suit, it could have almost the same effect as its original plan to ditch cookies — just without Google taking the blame this time. Until this is clear, all ad execs can do is speculate.”
Google is credited by some in the industry with a new level of transparency—but until there’s a plan and a timeline, there’s not much to say. And there can’t be a plan without regulatory sign-off, and so here we still are.
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.”
And in the meantime, ahead of any kind of timeline and plan, Privacy Sandbox related industry investments are likely on hold. How long a hold lasts before it turns to wastage remains to be seen. Nothing stands still, though.
As for users, this major retrench means no likelihood of any meaningful change anytime soon. Meanwhile, “your browsing is being watched,” as Apple would say.
And for the industry, Digiday describes it pretty aptly: “Google’s sudden U-turn on its plan to scrap third-party cookies, after years of promising otherwise, is like a TV show hyping up an epic twist, only to reveal it was all just a dream. No surprise ad tech leaders are pulling their hair out in frustration.”
To end on the unnerving timing of Apple’s Chrome attack ad. Chrome wasn’t name-checked in the ad, albeit it was in the accompanying Webkit update. But the ad is titled “Flock,” and FLoC was the first serious proposal from Google’s Privacy Sandbox Team. Someone, somewhere just might be smiling as this all plays out.