Google revealed yesterday that their Chrome browser would continue support for 3rd party cookies until late 2023. While shouts of joy echoed from the rooftops of ad tech companies everywhere, consumers should be thankful too. Here’s why.
In early 2020 (not many good sentences start with those three words…), Google announced plans to make 3rd party cookies obsolete by 2022. This was part of what they called their “Privacy Sandbox initiative.”
The proposed alternative to the cookie is called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts).
While 3rd party cookies are highly individual, FLoC groups people into segments based on attributes like online behaviour, etc.
And with FLoC, browsing data would be kept inside a user’s browser, rather than sent to other companies (advertisers, etc.). The browser? Chrome.
Good in theory, but like any sandbox, things get messy.
Aside from the obvious uproar in adtech – where entire business ecosystems survive on this technology – the general consensus around FLoC was that of confusion. How will these cohorts/groups be created? What level of targeting will be available to advertisers? If Google guards all the data and doesn’t share it with anyone else, doesn’t that give them a significant advantage?
And this is where FLoC goes from a few cute ducks flying in formation, to a swarm out of a Hitchcock film.
Google owns a lot: Chrome, YouTube, 92.05% off online search, DoubleClick (ad platform that’s now part of Google Ads), Looker (business intelligence/data), the list goes on. That means they have a lot of data. Too much.
Privacy experts, ad tech companies, and watchdogs in the UK and EU are not pleased with FLoC. Whether or not it goes against antitrust laws is still being investigated.
Google says, “We’re working on privacy measures”. What that means is, “We’re keeping all the data to ourselves.”
Instead of an open, democratized internet, we’re left with a sort of Orwellian control-state, where a single omnipotent corporation dictates and manipulates everything done online.
A bit dramatic? Maybe. But here we are. It’s 2021, after all.
Regardless of how you feel about targeted ads, we can all agree that when one organization holds all the power, we all lose. This is something that history and science fiction can agree on whole-heartedly.
What comes next for the cookie and FLoC? We’ll just have to wait, and keep playing in the proverbial sandbox to find out.
