In a recent press release, Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, announced that they will be expanding their testing of the Privacy Sandbox. This means that the development of the Privacy Sandbox will take longer than expected, until Q3 2023. By that time, Chavez expects the Privacy Sandbox APIs to be launched and widely available in Chrome.
As developers begin to adopt the Privacy Sandbox API, Google will start phasing out third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. This delay doesn't come as a surprise, as the original plan was to phase out third-party cookies this year.
The Privacy Sandbox is designed to protect user privacy while supporting the growth of businesses on the open web. One of the most well-known outputs of the Sandbox is the Topics API, which replaces FLoC (Federate Learning of Cohorts) and serves as a replacement for interest targeting.
But what are third-party cookies and why should you be aware of them when browsing the web?
What are cookies?
A cookie is a small piece of data (under 4 kb) stored in the browser for a website in the form of a key-value pair. It’s basically text (string) in a certain format understandable by the browser: "User_id": "12345". It is temporary info that a browser stores for further requests to that website server. Concretely: It’s a web-based technology (mobile applications are not depending on cookies) mainly meant to identify a user, or more specifically a browser.
On login, the server stores the string and everytime the browser makes a request to the server it sends the cookie back, so the server knows who that user is. For example, when you login into a website, the cookie is used to re-identify when that user comes back in a new session, set the correct language for the identified user and pre-load some default information.
Cookies can be divided into two categories: first-party cookies, which are only available to the website owner, and third-party cookies, which originate from other websites and are typically used for advertising. First-party cookies are used to improve the user experience on a website, while third-party cookies are used for a variety of purposes, including advertising.
In general, third-party cookies are the issue for the privacy-concerned. The reason is that these are stored under a different domain than you are currently visiting. Cross-domain tracking is the reason you’re seeing targeted ads of the website you visited, or the plane you haven’t booked yet. Third-party cookies are like a trail of crumbs. People generally don’t realize they are leaving information behind for other websites to pick up.
Third-party cookies are one of the reasons why General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced, the main reason why Safari released Intelligent Tracking Prevention, and why Google started building their Privacy Sandbox API.
Is there any use to third-party cookies?
To a lot of web users, third-party cookies are nothing more than a liability. For them, these cookies are nothing more than a revenue stream for advertisers and a way for advertising technology to gather data for intrusive purposes.
But is there any use to third-party cookies besides advertising? Yes, in fact there is. Many plugins, like live chat services or social media plugins, are in fact using cookies. These cookies are used to activate the application by the former and to allow users to sign in or share the website content by the latter.
However, the real use of these cookies is personalized advertising. Because they can keep track of your individual interests, you’re way more likely to see an advertisement that resonates to your behaviour. The expected outcome is that users are more likely to engage with these ads. After all, if you are forced to see the ads, it's better if they are related to your interests.
It is a fact that third-party cookies are most useful for marketing purposes, and give little to no added value to the end-user. Only a very little amount of websites (or part of those websites) will break by disabling third-party cookies.
Third-party cookies’ days are numbered. It is only a matter of time until regulators and consumers force the industry to remove them, and many advertisers will have to shift to alternatives. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but today the industry is far off from being ready for making the switch to alternative advertising, like cohorts and contextual advertising. The decision of Google to postpone the release of the Privacy Sandbox API is one of the many signals we’re getting that underlines that.
Robbe Desmyttere
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