What Google’s Reversal on Cookies Means for Advertisers

24 Jul 2024

Google won’t be tossing its cookies after all.

For years the search giant had promised that, one day, it would eventually do away with the little text files that websites and browsers such as Google Chrome exchange to track people across the internet. But after repeatedly delaying the move, it said Monday it will go another way.

“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, a project aimed at replacing cookies with different privacy tools and standards, wrote in a blog post.

Cookies became a hot-button issue in recent years as they sit at the centre of different competing interests. Advertisers like cookies because they help them target their digital ads, making sure they get in front of the customers most likely to find them relevant. Publishers who sell ad space like them because they want to serve shoppers ads they’re more likely to click on, driving more revenue for them.

But because cookies can store an abundance of user information, including data that could potentially be used to identify people online, critics and regulators have argued allowing them by default violates consumers’ privacy. The files were a key focus of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which took effect in 2018, and companies like Apple have blocked cookies in their web browsers.

Google — whose Chrome browser owns about 64 percent of the global browser market, according to web analytics firm Similarweb, making it by far the most popular choice — planned to replace cookies with its Privacy Sandbox tools in hopes of satisfying regulators, consumers and advertisers. But the task has proved difficult. UK authorities worried Privacy Sandbox didn’t protect privacy enough and that swapping it for cookies would reinforce the market dominance of Google’s ad-management tools.

Google isn’t abandoning Privacy Sandbox, but now it won’t ditch cookies either. That doesn’t mean advertisers should expect a free-for-all when it comes to tracking and targeting Chrome users, however.