You know that user choice mechanism that Google said it was planning to release for third-party cookies in Chrome?
Well, it’s not happening.
Google changed its mind. Going forward, it’ll be business as usual for third-party cookies.
“We’ve made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies,” wrote Anthony Chavez, Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, in a blog post on Tuesday.
“Users can continue to choose the best option for themselves in Chrome’s Privacy and Security Settings,” he continued.
In short: The ad tech industry is pretty much back where it started in late 2019 when Google first announced plans to deprecate third-party cookies and launch the Chrome Privacy Sandbox.
Why is this happening?
According to Chavez, Google is still planning to invest in the Privacy Sandbox APIs.
But the choice mechanism proved to be a no-go after Google got copious and conflicting feedback from the industry on its potential user prompt.
“As we’ve engaged with the ecosystem, including publishers, developers, regulators and the ads industry,” Chavez wrote, “it remains clear that there are divergent perspectives on making changes that could impact the availability of third-party cookies.”
That’s an understatement.
The deprecation of third-party cookies consumed the industry for well over five years and led companies to invest tons of time and money – arguably fruitlessly – into testing the Sandbox APIs and preparing for deprecation that never came.
But there are other reasons for not launching a cookie choice prompt for Chrome, beyond a lack of consensus among stakeholders.
“A lot has changed” since 2019, Chavez wrote, pointing to Google’s “formal engagement” with competition and data protection regulators in the UK and the acceleration of adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies in general.
Not to mention that Apple just got hit with a 150 million euro fine in late March by France’s competition authority for using its AppTrackingTransparency framework to further its own interests at the expense of competitors. France’s decision improves the odds that Germany – which is running a parallel investigation into antitrust concerns related to ATT – will come to a similar conclusion.
It’s quite possible Google saw that news and thought: “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
What next?
Chavez notes in his post that Google still plans to enhance tracking protections in Chrome’s Incognito mode, which already blocks third-party cookies by default, including IP Protection, a feature that prevents advertisers and publishers from tracking a user’s IP address by routing traffic through a proxy.
IP Protection will launch in Q3.
That’s all well and good, but what about the future of the Privacy Sandbox?
There’s nothing in the post to say that Google is shutting the initiative down, but one would be forgiven for wondering about its future.
“In light of this update, we understand that the Privacy Sandbox APIs may have a different role to play in supporting the ecosystem,” Chavez wrote, a tad ambiguously. “We’ll engage with the industry to gather feedback and share an updated roadmap for these technologies, including our future areas of investment, in the coming months.”
