Four and a half years ago, Google (GOOG) laid out an extraordinary plan to stop supporting third-party cookies—widely used by advertisers since the web's early days to track what people do online—in its market-leading Chrome browser. The company said it would replace those cookies with its own “Privacy Sandbox” technology that would let advertisers target users with the most appropriate ads.
It pitched the idea as a way to “increase the privacy of web browsing,” but the plan kept hitting roadblocks—and yesterday Google all but abandoned it. What happened is pretty complicated—and it’s this complexity, reflecting the conflicting imperatives of the various players in the web ecosystem, that was Google’s undoing.
Third-party cookies—that is to say, cookies left in a browser that share or record information across multiple websites—give advertising technology companies a way to create profiles of users’ interests, which is how much of the online economy is funded. But it’s also creepy and something that many people would rather avoid.
Back in 2019, Google acknowledged the problems with third-party cookies by setting up the Privacy Sandbox project with the aim of letting users “control how their information is collected.” At the start of 2020, it said the idea was so promising that it could “sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete.” Google claimed it would therefore phase out Chrome’s support for third-party cookies within two years.
