You can read more about this decision in a July 2024 blog post from Google.
I have some really mixed feelings about their decision. To be honest, I found their blog post pretty frustrating. Let me explain. When I first learned the news about losing third-party cookies, I was shocked. Immediately, I thought about the potential impact of that decision.
“How will single sign-on work between different domains?”
“Oh wow, then personalized ads will not be possible.”
“That will impact every single digital advertising service company, platform provider, and business trying to advertise online. “
These were just three immediate thoughts I had while I learned about the decision to eliminate these types of cookies. But… when I read why they made the decision, citing increasing regulatory pressure to prioritize privacy and putting privacy limits on advertisers, I came around to thinking that we were all doing this for the greater good.
This is where my mistake was made. I definitely had some cognitive dissonance and knew that Google would not make a decision that would impact themselves so critically, like losing massive amounts of ad revenue because they couldn’t target visitors to the level social media platforms can. But they stayed the course for a long time, years in fact, and the longer they stayed the course, and the deadline kept approaching, I thought, “Wow, they are serious. They are going to do this. We are going to have to be ready.” And then, Google made a VERY OBVIOUS decision. Let’s keep our advertisers happy and give the user a bit more control. They bent the knee… To themselves…
I’m not frustrated because they changed their minds. I change my mind too, it happens. It’s totally fine that they put more power in the users’ hands and let them make their own decisions. I love this approach. I’m frustrated because the reasons they provided to change their minds were 100% obvious. Google should have thought through solutions for the roadblocks before making their announcement to depreciate 3rd-party cookies in the first place.
I’m sure most of us have been researching how to deal with the looming restrictions and invested time and money into finding a way to keep the current level of data, only to find out that there is no way to keep 100% of it.
Overall, I’m mostly pleased with the proposed outcome as a stopgap, but seriously, they could have just added that functionality to Chrome years ago without wasting so much time and resources. At this point, the privacy regulation initiative seems completely performative.
And remember, in the end, users will still be able to manage their privacy better, so our data will still be incomplete. I kind of wish they just ripped the band-aid off and forced everyone to find a new way.
What’s better, incomplete data or completely new data requirements/restrictions? I’m not sure what I think, but incomplete data (current plan) doesn’t seem like a win.
