Google's Chrome Begins Purging Third-Party Cookies (google.com) 19
"If you have been affected, you will will receive a notification when you open Chrome on either desktop or Android devices," reports Search Engine Land. But they add that "discussions among digital marketers on X indicate that advertisers are still not ready..."
An anonymous reader writes: Google started its campaign to phase out of third-party cookies as announced earlier. At the beginning cookies are turned off for 1% of users, and those lucky ones unlock a "tracking protection" in Chrome settings. In agreement with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority, third-party cookies will be completely removed at the end of this year, a move under tight anti-competition scrutiny also in Brussels. Meanwhile, a technology researcher released their privacy audit of Google's third-party cookie replacement, Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API, validating its standing against EU data protection, which may even close the ever-present cookie consent popups disliked universally in Europe.
An anonymous reader writes: Google started its campaign to phase out of third-party cookies as announced earlier. At the beginning cookies are turned off for 1% of users, and those lucky ones unlock a "tracking protection" in Chrome settings. In agreement with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority, third-party cookies will be completely removed at the end of this year, a move under tight anti-competition scrutiny also in Brussels. Meanwhile, a technology researcher released their privacy audit of Google's third-party cookie replacement, Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API, validating its standing against EU data protection, which may even close the ever-present cookie consent popups disliked universally in Europe.
Reminder to support non Chromium browsers (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
None of the others listed look to be progressed enough to function yet. They don't even claim to support any form of cookies yet, let alone support blocking them.
That's how privacy-focused they are, no cookies at all!
Re: Reminder to support non Chromium browsers (Score:3)
Try librewolf
Purging cookie? (Score:3, Funny)
So for anyone wondering why they're doing this (Score:5, Informative)
The point being that they're not doing this out of the kindness of their heart or even pressure to improve privacy controls
Re: (Score:2)
The point being that they're not doing this out of the kindness of their heart or even pressure to improve privacy controls
This is how they sell it in the various press releases.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: So for anyone wondering why they're doing thi (Score:2)
I do work at Google :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: So for anyone wondering why they're doing thi (Score:2)
Good thinking ;)
Re: (Score:2)
https://time.com/4060575/alpha... [time.com]
TL;DR Google are intensely comfortable with "doing evil", by their own admission.
Re:So for anyone wondering why they're doing this (Score:5, Interesting)
It's because they have other more effective ways to track people and this hurts their competitors in the online advertising space by making it harder for them to track you without impacting Google's ability to track you.
You're right that this is a self-interested move, but completely wrong about the mechanism.
The Privacy Sandbox stuff absolutely destroys Google's ability to track you, by design, but it does it in a way that doesn't significantly impact Google's ability to advertise to you. Google doesn't and has never cared about tracking people, only about being able to advertise to them; tracking has always been an unpleasant necessity for targeted advertising. Tracking people is actually bad for Google, it's bad PR, creates significant risk if Google is hacked, and it provokes an endless stream of warrants and subpoenas that Google must spend money to respond to (no, governments don't pay, they just issue court orders).
But now Google has figured out a way to do effective targeted advertising without tracking. It doesn't significantly aid Google as compared to competitors, because the competitors can use the same provably-anonymized interest data from the browser that Google gets. What it does do for Google is remove a target from their back.
Re: (Score:2)
This prevents Google from tracking you too. While obviously on their own websites they can track users, disabling 3rd party cookies means that their analytics on other sites can only see an IP address. An address that is shared in most cases.
Even that may be going away, as Google is proposing a way to hide IP addresses from websites.
Awesome! (Score:3)
That means plugins only have to take care of Google cookies now!
Yeah it's great. The problem is... (Score:3)
...what Google is cooking up to replace 3rd party cookies is way worse [techcrunch.com].
You didn't really believe Google worked in the users' best interest did you?
Re: Yeah it's great. The problem is... (Score:2)
No more "login with Google" on websites. (Score:2)