Here’s what you need to know — and do.
Updated on January 31 with new developments on Apple’s complex relationship with Google when it comes to browsing and search.
Google’s backtrack on its promise to kill tracking cookies last year created a huge furor. But all seems to have gone rather quiet since then. In the background, there are all kinds of standoffs as no one can agree on what should happen next. Meanwhile, Google has suddenly brought back digital fingerprinting for some added spice.
But those devilish little cookies are still with us, and if you’re one of Chrome’s 3 billion users, then they’re still following you around, reporting back to their ad-industry masters. There is no real clarity as yet as to what happens next, when it happens, and how the ad industry and Google and regulators will ever find common ground.
The issue is that Google wants to offer an opt-in (or opt-out) for users to decide whether to enable tracking cookies on their browser. The industry fears a cataclysmic rejection akin to Apple’s opt-out, which caused chaos for all those tracking iPhone users. There is also the question as to what Google can use instead, given its account-based insight into all those users that is not as reliant on cookies.
Cue DigiDay’s latest, of which it warns “anyone waiting for Google to drop a game-changing cookie update can go ahead and breathe — it’s not coming with this one.”
But what seems to have been decided is that the opt-in prompt will be global, which is the sledgehammer solution. Because when asked if they want to be tracked, the smart money is on most users saying no, I do not.
“It’s hardly groundbreaking information,” DigiDay says, “but it does signal the direction things are heading: Web advertising is inching closer to the mobile app model, where consent-based prompts from Google and Apple already dictate privacy settings.”
And it seems that whatever happens will extend beyond cookies into tracking IP addresses as well, which you will only be able to hide when browsing “incognito.”
This is all very high-level and has not yet provided enough substance for a backlash from anyone. But when the detail comes that will quickly change. How this is designed end executed will be critical. And all eyes will be on Google and any conflicts that might appear in how the new ad-industry order is being restructured.
As DigiDay points out, “after five years of investment into Google’s promised cookie overhaul, ad execs are fed up with delays and half measures. Beneath it all, skepticism lingers: If consent collection drives the majority of Chrome users to opt out of third-party tracking, Google will still have access to user data at the transactional level — thanks to its own walled garden.”
Google isn’t saying much, other than to point out there’s nothing really new here. But perhaps that’s the point, we’ve seen all this before and yet here we all still are.
A wry irony in this story comes from Apple. The iMaker has used Chrome’s patchy track record on user tracking to promote Safari for its own device users, but when it comes to search it takes a very different view. And that has some additional parallels now, with Apple’s tracking opt-outs being used as a likely precedent for Google’s plan to do something along similar lines with Chrome.
Apple has yet again waded into Google’s regulatory wrangles around Chrome and Search with another attempt to insert itself into the legal case against Google to present its own views. As reported by The Verge, “Apple requested at the very least that it gain access to discovery and depositions as a non-party while the Circuit Court considers its appeal. ‘Absent a stay,’ the company writes, ‘Apple will suffer irreparable harm’.”
It’s hard to reconcile the Apple/Google search relationship when it’s so intrinsically linked with tracking. But for Apple users, what’s invariably true is that they will endure less tracking if they use Google Search from within Apple’s browser, especially if not logged into a Google account at the time. So, there’s that at least.
As The Washington Post points out, “Apple deserves credit for making many privacy protections automatic with Safari, which you probably use to browse the web if you have an iPhone, Mac computer or iPad,” adding that “Safari stops third-party cookies anywhere you go on the web. So do Mozilla’s Firefoxand the Brave browser. You can use either of those on a Windows PC, Mac, iPhone or Android device. Safari is only available for Mac, iPhones and iPads. Chrome allows third-party cookies in most cases unless you turn them off.”
Meanwhile, for those 3 billion Chrome users, the promise is a one-click “leave me alone” button that will kill cookies. Better they had been killed for everyone all at once, but at least you can kill them for yourself, with that easy button when it comes.
Quite what will be done instead remains to be seen.
