The Cookie Crumbles, once again!!!

When it comes to Privacy, you would imagine a company like Google would have got its affairs in order. This is almost a Y2K moment for Ad Tech companies. For the second time, Google has decided to delay the launch of an alternative to cookie based targeting with Chrome. This means Privacy is a losing game for a few more months, being pushed to 2024. But it shows a far more serious issue and could have far reaching concerns for the entire industry.

Based on this, Privacy Sandbox, a set of proposals that attempt to build an alternative to cookie based targeting on Google Chrome, is not ready yet and the support for cookies will continue to be enabled all the way to 2024. This sounds similar to a time when Google originally said in early initial months of 2020 that it was planning to phase out support for third-party cookies entirely by the end of 2022. Then Google came out with an updated timeline saying that the plan was to begin phasing out cookies in mid-2023, finishing in late 2023.?

Competitors Apple and Mozilla have already banned cookie support for their browsers. Way back in 2020, Forrester came up with a valid requirement to build a "Zero-Party Data" solution that asks customer what they want and a lot of websites actually do that, courtesy GDPR. But consent is still a cookie-driven phenomenon these days and will be continuing till Google lifts support for cookies. Chrome still has a whopping 65% market share of browsers.

One proposal in the Privacy Sandbox was called The Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. The solution aimed to collect information about browsing habits and assign users to a group (a cohort) of users with similar browsing histories. Each cohort will have an ID which could be used by ad tech companies to derive a user's browsing pattern. This was just another way of renaming cookies and selling it in a new bottle. Obviously it faced harsh criticism and was shown the doors and got replaced by Topics, almost 7 months after delaying the rollout of FLoC to late 2023.

One thing which I fail to understand is why has Google not thought about a co-op model, working with all sorts of publisher. Surely, it will eat into the profit coffers but will eventually lead to a sustainable model driven by privacy. Efforts are already in place to start over and build an ecosystem of all publishers (albeit fragmented) like TrustX and OpenAP. This levels the playing field for all and helps attain better user experience across platforms and portals without the user having to compromise on Privacy. Given the EU is close on Google's heels attempting a monopolistic and anti-trust break up (even went as far as Open Index, separating the search index from the services), it is only in Google's interest to move t more inclusive solution.

The alternative to this Ad Tech Y2K moment being unresolved will be a lack of access to information in the future. A lot of information today out there (with exceptions like Wiki) is powered by ads and the better the targeting skills of the ad, the better the returns. However, infringement of privacy to get better bucks has always faced a backlash and will soon need to find a balance, sandbox or not.

The best solution here is to forget hyper-personalization and move to contextual advertising instead of behaviour based targeting. Based on the current browsing patterns of a user, anonymously, serve ads. It is not always necessary that behavioural patterns stay consistent for every session by the user. The private graph goes a long way in mitigating that risk, but is still a siloed solution for now. For mere mortals like you and me, this is a wait game while the elephants fight it out. Let us see what comes out a winner in this Y2K battle.