Google on Monday abandoned plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome web browser more than four years after it introduced the option as part of a broader set of controversial proposals called the Privacy Sandbox.
“Instead of making third-party cookies obsolete, we’d introduce a new experience in Chrome that allows people to make informed choices that apply to their web browsing, and they can change those choices at any time,” — Anthony Chavez deputy president of the initiative, said.
“We are discussing this new pathway with regulators and will engage with the industry as we roll it out.”
The significant policy reversal comes nearly three months after the company announced that it intends to to eliminate third-party cookies from early next year after repeated delays, underscoring the project’s tumultuous history.
While Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox no longer support third-party cookies since early 2020, Google has had a harder time disabling them due to its important role as a web browser and advertising platform provider.
The company’s idea is to balance online privacy and ad-supported internet with Privacy Sandbox courted close attention from regulators, advertisers, and privacy advocates, which has led it to redefine the cookie-replacement technology several times over the past few years.
Last month, Austrian privacy non-profit (None of Your Business) said it simply transfers control from the third party to Google and can still be used to track users without giving them the opportunity to provide informed and transparent consent.
Apple has been criticized for introducing advanced tracking and fingerprint protections in Safari Theme APIa critical aspect of the Privacy Sandbox, which sorts users’ interests into an ever-evolving list of predefined topics based on their browsing history to serve personalized ads.
“The user is not told in advance which topics Chrome has tagged him or which topics it shows to which parties,” – Apple’s John Wilander. saidnoting how it can be used to fingerprint and re-identify users, and to profile their cross-site activity.
In particular, he pointed to implementation holes that could potentially allow a data broker embedded in websites to capture a user’s changing interests over time by periodically querying the Topics API and creating a persistent profile by combining it with other data points.
“Now imagine what advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence can do about you based on different combinations of interest signals,” Wilander said. “What patterns will emerge when data brokers and trackers are able to compare and contrast large portions of the population?”
“We believe that the Internet should not reveal such information on websites, and we do not believe that a browser, ie. the user agent must facilitate the collection or use of such data.”
The Privacy Sandbox has also faced regulatory hurdles over the technology’s potential to give Google an unfair advantage in the digital advertising market and limit competition, further complicating the rollout process.
This development is an acknowledgment by Google that achieving industry consensus around a single solution is more difficult than it seems. Moving away from cookies “will require significant work by many stakeholders and will impact publishers, advertisers and everyone involved in online advertising,” it said.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is closely monitoring the changes made by the search giant, said it was assessing the impact of the new notice.
“Instead of removing third-party cookies from Chrome, it will introduce a user-choice prompt that will allow users to choose whether or not to store third-party cookies,” the CMA said in a statement. said. “The CMA will now work closely with the (Information Commissioner’s Office) to scrutinize Google’s new approach to the Privacy Sandbox.”
