Cookies stalk us. Roughly 42 per cent of websites host 20 cookies or more. Publishers are among the largest users. Thousands of cookies exist, just about you.
They’re the backbone of ad targeting, used by Google and others for years, to transact trillions, but the real price, global regulators argue, has been consumer privacy.
Cookies were created in the bygone era of the 1990s with a different goal. They were designed to give the web a memory, so users received more personalised browsing.
Google’s turned that consumer-centric vision into advertising’s magic money making machine, and industrialised cookies into a $2.1 billion monopoly.
Over time, consumers, governments and regulators have become more aware, and vociferous, about the rise of what’s become known as surveillance capitalism.
Four years ago, Apple, Firefox, and others, proactively chose to stop using cookies for targeting. Microsoft added an option for users to turn them off in its Edge browser.
Google said it would follow suit, and this had huge implications for millions of site owners as its Chrome browser dominates the market with a 66 per cent share.
The news sent millions in ad tech rushing to prepare for the cookie-apocalypse, until Google stunned the www last week and announced it is sticking with them.
I wrote at the time:
It was Google’s next big thing. It promised it would thread the needle of enabling targeting while protecting users’ privacy.
But sceptics complained it was another data black box, which ensured Google would maintain its 90 per cent monopoly on search advertising.
It would also ensure that Google’s GAM ad server and ad infrastructure would be even more unbeatable in the coming era of digital advertising.
Google’s countered that it should be trusted because it would protect users’ privacy. Only regulators were not having it.
At the heart of the concern was Google’s proposed replacement, called Privacy Sandbox.
Regulators led by the UK believed it was a cynical ploy to pass its ads dominance to the next era.
The outcome was that Google crumbled, cookies are staying in Chrome, and people will keep being followed, but with one major concession: Google users will now be offered the option to turn cookies off.
I joined
, host of Moolah on Disrupt Radio, to dive into the melée to look at how this will play out for consumers.And to consider are the larger implications as Big Tech’s profit motive increasingly comes into conflict with global regulators’ concerns over privacy.
How everyday people are impacted by Google's cookie-shambles