Third-party cookies are a privacy nightmare, but Privacy Sandbox — Google’s proposed alternative for targeting ads and tracking web activity — drew plenty of criticism of its own. Depending on who you talked to over the last five years, it was less effective for marketers, financially devastating for publishers, a way to tighten Google’s grip on the ad tech market, and caused more privacy problems than it solved.
Now Google won’t kill cookies, but let users choose how they are tracked. What form that choice will take remains to be seen — there could be a setting quietly added to your web browser, but it could also be more direct, like a pop-up when you open Chrome.
Something like this happened before, and it was a big deal. In 2021, Apple asked iPhone users if they wanted their apps to share data with each other. An estimated 40% to 50% of users blocked tracking, making ad targeting less effective and costing apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap billions of dollars. With nearly two-thirds of people choosing Chrome as their browser, don’t be surprised if tech companies take another hit to their balance sheets if Google takes the more direct approach.