Cookies power a $ 400 billion advertising ecosystem

Google slows down on the elimination of third-party cookies from Chrome, which slips from the beginning of 2022 to the end of 2023, almost two years after the date announced in January 2020. The extension, announced the Mountain View giant, will be used to study new technologies more effective to reconcile targeted advertising and respect for privacy. The heart is the Privacy Sandbox project, launched in 2019, which aims to develop collaborative and open source solutions that protect user privacy at the same time without harming companies and developers that rely on advertising and offering free content. Cookies are snippets of code that allow you to track the activity and behavior of a user while browsing, and consequently allow you to provide targeted advertising. “People should not be forced to agree to be tracked while browsing online in order to receive relevant advertisements,” Mountain View said announcing the launch of the Privacy Sandbox initiative. At the moment, in fact, it is those who surf who can choose how and how much to be “followed”, manually setting their preferences, both on the browser and on the sites. It is nothing more than the message that you must buy when we enter a site and asks us to accept or not the tracking, and which was introduced on the basis of the privacy concerns of the supervisory authorities at international level. the authorization to be followed, but the step designed by Google goes further, with the total elimination of third-party cookies – those that trace the navigation from one site to another, not those that follow the experience on the single site. Google has also clarified that once the third-party cookies are deleted it will not create alternative identifiers to track people as they browse the Internet, nor will it use them in its products. An extremely destabilizing move for the internet advertising ecosystem, which is worth around 400 billion dollars globally. The goal is to find solutions that balance privacy and targeting, and Google is doing this by developing a technology that can replace any type of individual identifier by working with aggregated data for interest groups, called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC). The initiative concerns only Google products (and therefore Google Ads), but with a significant impact: Chrome alone covers more than half of the use of browsers for navigation, followed by Apple’s Safari with about 20%. However, there are those who do not see it as a clear initiative to protect privacy: the British competition and market authority is investigating Sandbox and has announced that it reserves the right to block the “turning off” of cookies if it emerges that the switch could be harmful to competition, blocking the system in use and in fact abusing its dominant position making it more difficult for small advertisers to place their targeted advertising.