Google announced that it has begun testing Tracking Protection — a feature that restricts website access to third-party cookies and in doing so, limits cross-site tracking. If a site doesn’t work with Tracking Protection in place, Google will provide the users an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that specific website.
Third-party cookies are small pieces of data used by websites to track a person’s activities. Advertisers also use them to track users across websites to target personalized ads, and also assess how these ads are performing. Tracking Protection is a part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox which aims to phase out third-party cookies and limit covert tracking by providing publishers with safer alternatives.
Tracking Protection will be rolled out to 1% of Google Chrome’s global users with a plan to phase out third-party cookies for everyone by the second half of 2024. Google mentions that the complete rollout of Tracking Protection will be subject to “addressing any remaining competition concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.”
Some context:
In 2020, Google pledged to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome within two years. Then in 2021, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) began an investigation against Google’s proposal to remove third-party cookies from Chrome browsers. CMA pointed out that cookies play a fundamental role in online advertising. It said that their removal could undermine “the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market power.”
In 2022, CMA accepted Google’s legally binding commitment to address the competition concerns. Notably, these commitments require Google to work with the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to resolve concerns as the Privacy Sandbox tools are being developed. It also provides for a standstill period before third-party cookies are removed, allowing the CMA to take action if any competition concerns remain.
Google’s alternatives to third-party cookies:
In 2021, Google indicated that once third-party cookies are phased out, it will depend on aggregation, anonymization, and on-device processing to replace individual identifiers. It suggested FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) as an alternative to cookies, explaining that FLoC allows users to be targeted as a part of groups with common interests rather than based on their individual online activities. FLoC was criticized by some who claimed that it could pose a risk of discrimination when classifying users, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation even calling it a “terrible idea”.
Then, in 2022, it shut down FLoC and replaced it with “Topics”. Google explained that the Chrome browser would now determine some topics that the user has been looking into during a week and reflect their top interests as reflected by their browser history under Topics such as “fitness” or “travel&transportation”. These topics would only be kept for three weeks, following which they will be deleted. Topics exclude around 350 sensitive categories including gender and race.
Is Google as gung-ho about privacy as it claims?
In the last week of December 2023, Google settled a US$5 billion lawsuit that claimed that the company was tracking users in Incognito mode. The lawsuit, which began in 2020, alleged that Google continued to track users in Incognito mode when they visited a website that uses Google Analytics or Google Ad Manager. Given that cookies are effectively a tool for tracking users, Google’s alleged engagement in user tracking makes one question how committed the company truly is to user privacy.
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Google launches tracking protection to restrict third-party cookies - MediaNama.com
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