XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11, alt.privacy, alt.privacy.anon-server
Google has an announcement today: It's not going to do something it has
thought about, and tinkered with, for quite some time.
Most people who just use the Chrome browser, rather than develop for it or
try to serve ads to it, are not going to know what "A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web" could possibly mean. The very short version is that
Google had a "path," first announced in January 2020, to turn off third-
party (i.e., tracking) cookies in the most-used browser on Earth, bringing
it in line with Safari, Firefox, and many other browsers. Google has
proposed several alternatives to the cookies that follow you from page to
page, constantly pitching you on that space heater you looked at three
days ago. Each of these alternatives has met varying amounts of resistance
from privacy and open web advocates, trade regulators, and the advertising industry.
So rather than turn off third-party cookies by default and implement new solutions inside the Privacy Sandbox, Chrome will "introduce a new
experience" that lets users choose their tracking preferences when they
update or first use Chrome. Google will also keep working on its Privacy Sandbox APIs but in a way that recognizes the "impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising." Google also did
not fail to mention it was "discussing this new path with regulators."
Why today? What does it really mean? Let's journey through more than four
and a half years of Google's moves to replace third-party cookies, without deeply endangering its standing as the world's largest advertising
provider.
2017–2022: FLoC or “What if machines tracked you, not cookies?”
Google's big moves toward a standstill likely started at Apple
headquarters. Its operating system updates in the fall of 2017 implemented
a 24-hour time limit on ad-targeting cookies in Safari, the default
browser on Macs and iOS devices. A "Coalition of Major Advertising Trade Associations" issued a sternly worded letter opposing this change, stating
it would "drive a wedge between brands and their customers" and make advertising "more generic and less timely and useful."
By the summer of 2019, Firefox was ready to simply block tracking cookies
by default. Google, which makes the vast majority of its money through
online advertising, made a different, broader argument against dropping third-party cookies. To paraphrase: Trackers will track, and if we don't
give them a proper way to do it, they'll do it the dirty way by
fingerprinting browsers based on version numbers, fonts, screen size, and
other identifiers. Google said it had some machine learning that could
figure out when it was good to share your browsing habits. For example:
New technologies like Federated Learning show that it's possible for your browser to avoid revealing that you are a member of a group that likes
Beyoncé and sweater vests until it can be sure that group contains
thousands of other people.
In January 2020, Google shifted its argument from "along with" to "instead
of" third-party cookies. Chrome Engineering Director Justin Schuh wrote, "Building a more private Web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete," suggesting that broad support for Chrome's privacy sandbox
tools would allow for dropping third-party cookies entirely. Privacy
advocate Ben Adida described the move as "delivering teeth" and "a big
deal." Feedback from the W3C and other parties, Schuh wrote at that time, "gives us confidence that solutions in this space can work."
As Google developed its replacement for third-party cookies, the path grew trickier and the space more perilous. The Electronic Frontier Foundation described Google's FLoC, or the "Federated Learning of Cohorts" that would
let Chrome machine-learn your profile for sites and ads, as "A Terrible
Idea." The EFF was joined by Mozilla, Apple, WordPress, DuckDuckGo, and
lots of browsers based on Chrome's core Chromium code in being either
opposed or non-committal to FLoC. Google pushed back testing FLOC until
late 2022 and third-party cookie removal (and thereby FLoC implementation) until mid-2023.
By early 2022, FLoC didn't have a path forward. Google pivoted to a Topics
API, which would give users a bit more control over which topics ("Rock
Music," "Auto & Vehicles") would be transmitted to potential advertisers.
It would certainly improve over third-party cookies, which are largely inscrutable in naming and offer the user only one privacy policy: block
them, or delete them all and lose lots of logins.
2022–2024: Sandboxes full of Topics
The self-imposed date for third-party cookie removal came up. It had been
two years since Mozilla and Apple blocked third-party cookies by default.
More than a year earlier, Apple showed iOS users which apps were
requesting to track them, and their response, as anticipated, was largely
"No." Google, by July 2022, said it wasn't ready to drop third-party
cookies and would support them until "the second half of 2024." The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was talking to Google at that time about how the Privacy Sandbox would work, and Google expected to give the public access to the Topics API in Q3 2023. And Google did just that,
adding three different pages about the topics you've shown interest in
over the past month to nested Chrome settings pages.
With the Privacy Sandbox implemented, Google next said in early 2023 that third-party cookies would be eliminated in the second half of 2024. In
April 2024, citing UK regulators concerned that Chrome having its own
exclusive user interest tracking would give Google's ad arm an unfair advantage, Google pushed it again to 2025.
Rather than wait for that deadline to arrive, Google has now preempted an almost inevitable change of plans and outlined a different scenario. And
here we are.
A prompt is not a block, but could still be big
Simultaneous to the post announcing a user prompt about third-party
tracking, Google Ads issued a whitepaper yesterday with a study suggesting
that display advertising placed with the Privacy Sandbox saw 97 percent as
much engagement as with traditional third-party cookies enabled and 97
percent as many "Conversions per dollar" (CPD) in display ads. Follow-up
ads to those same Sandbox users, however, garnered only 55 percent effectiveness in capturing the same attention. And these results come from
only 1 percent of Chrome users with the right APIs enabled. Media execs
told Digiday that, especially for smaller firms, testing and
experimentation is too costly and resource-intensive at the moment,
especially as timelines keep getting pushed.
The Sandbox is still being formed, in other words, and advertisers might
want to keep an eye on it for when the next big change happens. But the
big movement toward Topics is nowhere near a stampede yet.
That big change is not entirely defined, but it could be a prompt, as
suggested by the UK CMA in a post on X (formerly Twitter). After Apple
gave users the choice to tell apps to stop tracking them, social apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube lost something close to $10 billion in
revenue, according to a Financial Times analysis. Those businesses have presumably rebuilt their businesses to function in a world where
advertising cannot assume it will follow users around. Google has held off
on telling its advertisers to do something similar for years, but with its alternative still under development, that hard truth might be due soon.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/google-will-not-disable-tracking- cookies-in-chrome-after-years-of-trying/
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