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Like a group of children left alone with a box of Oreos, Google is making a bunch of cookies disappear.
What happened: Google has begun blocking third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users (~30 million people) as part of a test for its plans to eliminate them entirely by the year’s end.
- For those of you who blindly hit “accept cookies” whenever it pops up on a webpage (guilty), cookies are pieces of info that sites and browsers collect to track activity.
- Google’s changes will affect only third-party cookies, used by advertisers to target users, not first-party cookies, used by sites to remember stuff like your login info.
Why it matters: Third-party cookies have long been a privacy and security concern due to their presence on all kinds of websites, allowing advertisers to potentially access sensitive info you’d want kept private, like your medical history or your Real Housewives obsession.
- Safari and Firefox had already blocked them for this reason, but Chrome — which drives ~65% of internet traffic — doing so will cause the third-party cookie to crumble.
Catch-up: Google’s shift away from cookies has been in the works for a while. The company has been discussing ditching them for over a decade and initially set a target date of 2022, but has delayed plans multiple times to address concerns from competitors and advertisers.
- To keep the US$600 billion online ad industry afloat, Chrome is implementing a new way to track user interests called Topics, which categorizes searches more broadly.
Yes, but: Critics argue that Google’s plan is simply a ploy to give the tech giant even more dominance over the online ad market space. As part of its pilot, Google has agreed to let the U.K.’s competition bureau nix these plans if it finds them to be anti-competitive.—QH