Big news out of @Google’s Privacy Sandbox team. It “proposes” to not deprecate third-party cookies in #Chrome after all and instead give users the choice to ban cookies browser-wide.
If this came to pass, it would be great news for just about everyone in the industry. Publishers would no longer have to fear losing 20% or far more of their advertising revenue at Google’s throw of a switch in early 2025. Their ad targeting would remain more precise, and sales would not be impacted. Advertisers would have less of a reason to flee to alternative channels: shifting budgets to walled gardens and into retail media and using 1st-party data for targeting. Instead, they could spread their budgets also across the independent ecosystem, which would maintain more diversity, more choice, more competition, better ad products and lower ad prices. And AdTech vendors would stand to benefit from running that vibrant ecosystem.
Of course, this is just a reprieve, not a commutation of the death sentence for the cookie. Many users already routinely delete cookies on their machines. And almost all browsers have deprecated cookies already, with Google’s Chrome and @Microsoft’s #Edge being the only holdouts. (The reason why cookie deprecation in Chrome makes such big waves is because it holds the largest traffic share by far.)
Therefore, alternative solutions will remain important no matter what, such as single sign-on networks (SSO), cohort targeting, contextual targeting and even the good old curated “premium ad inventory”. Only now, everything would happen in slow motion, softening the blow to independents, and giving everyone more time to adapt. As a matter of fact, Google will continue work on Privacy Sandbox. It is also looking into “IP protection” in Chrome’s protected mode. A complete ban for using IP numbers for targeting can’t be far behind (as @Apple has already done). (This will also likely kill digital fingerprinting and might develop into a major problem for targeting #CTV inventory.)
With this proposal, Google in effect throws in the towel, strikes the sails and waves the white flag on Privacy Sandbox. It is an admission that the platform cannot deliver significantly better ad effectiveness than ads on completely unauthenticated traffic and deliver all the functionality that would be needed – at least not until early 2025.
Why does the Privacy Sandbox team just “propose” to not deprecate third-party cookies? Because they can’t be sure regulators, particularly the UK’s CMA and the EU’s privacy authorities, won’t see third-party cookies as a privacy Beelzebub.
But perhaps they won’t. The threat of cookies to privacy was overstated and had become a bit of a fetish in the industry anyway. Nobody can use them to do any serious harm to anyone, and their only commercial use is to show users ads that are more likely to be interesting to them than not.
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