Η Google is finally taking the next step in its multi-year effort to eliminate cookies on Chrome browser
From January 4, Google has disabled cookies for 1% of its users Chrome worldwide, i.e. for approx 30 million users. The company is starting small, but plans to permanently remove cookies for all Chrome users by the end of the year.
The war against cookies started several years ago, when tech giants such as Google and Facebook (now Meta) came under increasing scrutiny for various privacy issues. The use of third party cookies it was one of the things that came under serious scrutiny. For those who are not familiar with cookies, they are small files that websites use to store some information in your browser. Cookies have various uses, such as allowing you to stay logged in or remember what you have saved in your basket.
However, the majority of these useful functions are performed by first party cookies, which are managed by the website you are browsing. On the other hand, third-party cookies come from other websites and are usually used to track user activities on the Internet. These cookies are why your Google search for shoes resulted in shoe ads appearing on your favorite website. Obviously, third-party cookies are a major privacy problem, and they're also how companies like Google make a lot of money through online advertising.
You probably have two questions at this point. First, if Google removes cookies from Chrome, won't that hurt their advertising business? And secondly, won't this render many websites useless?
Regarding the first question, Google has a plan to continue to exploit the data. It's about privacy sandbox, which includes several complex tools that result in a slightly more private method of monitoring everything you do online. Through privacy sandbox, Chrome itself will act as a mediator for the data. The browser will track what you do and sort you into groups based on your activities, and then websites and advertisers will be able to target ads to those groups.
For example, if you spend a lot of time browsing online sportswear communities, Chrome will likely classify you into a sportswear group, and then shoe companies can target ads for their shoes to people in that group without seeing who actually belongs to the group or learning their browsing habits.
Although it privacy sandbox is more private than third-party cookies, the whole thing still relies on data collection to improve advertising, which will continue to annoy many users.
As for the second part, removing cookies can disrupt some websites, which is one of the reasons why Google is starting on a smaller scale. As part of the change, Chrome is getting new features that will allow it to detect if a website is experiencing problems and disable Tracking Protection for this particular website. Users can also manually disable it Tracking Protection by clicking the eye icon in the URL bar.
It is also worth remembering that the above does not apply to first-party cookies, which are more integral to the operation of websites and are not used for tracking. These cookies aren't going anywhere, even when Chrome officially removes them for everyone.
How will you know if you are in the first 30 million users
There are a few ways to tell if you're in the 1% of Chrome users who no longer receive third-party cookies.
First, you might see a pop-up message in Chrome in relation to Tracking Protection (Tracking Protection). This will appear as soon as you join the group of Chrome users who do not save cookies. Even if you don't see the pop-up, check for the eye icon in the URL bar we mentioned earlier.
Alternatively, you can check your Chrome settings. In the settings, there is a “Privacy and security” section, which should include a number of switches related to cookies. If all of these are enabled (and you didn't enable them yourself), you're probably one of the select few of this first launch.
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