[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday]

"After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard."

Advertisers are rejoicing. In other words: this is bad.

It's possible that Chrome's "new experience" that lets users make an "informed choice" across their web browsing is really good. Sincerely, though, I doubt it. Moving this to the realm of power user preferences rather than a blanket policy for everyone means that very few people are likely to use it.

The result is going to be a continued trend of tracking users across the web. The people who really, really care will do the work to use the interface; everyone else (including people who care about privacy!) won't have the time.

All this to help save the advertising industry. Which, forgive me, doesn't feel like an important goal to me.

Case in point: Chrome's Privacy Sandbox isn't actually going away, and this is what Digiday has to say about it:

"This could be a blessing in disguise, especially if Google’s plan gets Chrome users to opt out of third-party cookies. Since it’s all about giving people a choice, if a bunch of users decide cookies aren’t for them, the APIs in the sandbox might actually work for targeting them without cookies."

A "blessing in disguise" for advertisers does not read as an actual blessing to me.

#Technology

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