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Well, well…

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What are we breaking down…?

Google and its ongoing war against third-party cookies. Word on the street is Google isn’t ready just yet to abandon the cookies we’ve grown so accustomed to since the 90s. We were intrigued by some daily news posts and decided we should do our very first deep dive on the subject. Lets explore what third-party cookies are, and just why they are being removed from our browsers.

🍪 Who baked these?

While these cookies aren’t baked in your oven, they provide an essential service to you and the internet. These third-party cookies are essentially small text files used to store your information so that a browser or site remembers your data between sessions and with different websites. Before their creation, many websites struggled with the inability to retain personal data. The inventor, Lou Montulli, was only 23 years old while working to solve this issue and working for the company Netscape.

Montulli was faced with a predicament as he couldn’t decide between a number of solutions. A very difficult choice considering he was trail-blazing the internet we know and love today. Thus the cookie was born. It can be described as a small text file sent between a computer and a website or browser to store small amounts of data. Montulli’s main concern with the development of the cookie was that he wanted to keep user data private and safe. Unfortunately almost as soon as the technology was developed companies began using the Third party cookie as a tactic to track ad viewing on all the websites they advertised on. This began the era we know today, personalized ads getting ever more invasive.

How is Google trying to do it?

Google has repeatedly tried to end its reliance on third-party cookies for its data and preference tracking since 2020. In many ways, you as a consumer benefit from this change, as these cookies can track anything from how you interact on most websites and things you do on social media. Websites normally track all kinds of data from their visitors and customers, and so do the companies running ads on those sites. In fact they are often downloading cookies automatically upon viewing the page. Google is now trying to follow in the footsteps of other browsers which already rid themselves of this third-party cookie-based tracking framework.

This change has many companies fretting about the future of their online advertising. They love tracking user data so they can personalized ads and monitor website analytics. The solution Google has put forward is their new ‘Privacy Sandbox Technology’ which is billed as a total replacement for the old framework. With this sandbox they are attempting to reduce reliance on companies tracking every aspect of your online presence and focus more on relevant ads based on the content you are viewing at the time. With the internet poised to remake advertising, Google claims their ‘Sandbox’ is built to protect user privacy first.

The ‘Sandbox’ started in January and is currently being piloted by Google. Their new program launched with 30 million users with a focus on increasing advertiser satisfaction since. The stated goal was to remove cookies by December 2024, but just a few days ago delayed that yet again to 2025. With the delay, Google is attempting to give advertisers more time to refine their post-cookies plan. These companies worry the loss of data will place them at a disadvantage against Google themselves and also require significant cost to adapt to the new system. While Google aims to be completed by 2025, it remains to be seen if advertisers will fight to delay further.

The Global trend For privacy

Across the world and the net, the trend has been for limiting cookies access and requiring consent to have them installed. Firefox had begun blocking them since 2019, and Apple’s Safari in 2020. This combined with the increased strictness of privacy laws worldwide are making life difficult for third party tracking software on the internet as a whole.

In Europe, under the E.U.’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), has been significant attempts at limiting tracking placed on user data. Cookies are now being associated with personal identity if they collect said user data, and as such they now require clear consent to be given to every user visiting the site which uses these cookies. This legal pressure has been making life difficult for advertisers already before the Google policy shift. Now with Google finally zeroing in on a replacement system that actually works, the ‘cookies’ days may be numbered.

Europe’s push to unanimously protect its users from being targeted by marketers also stretches globally. In the US, there are a few states now starting to pass laws inspired by the European approach to privacy. In fact, These laws and GDPR in particular, may be one major reasons google and others are even making this change in the first place. As most of the companies are multinational and bound by these rules in a lot of cases if they wish to service the European market. Its definitely a great thing to know about!