Google Commits to Not Use, Build 3rd-Party Cookie Alternatives That Track Individuals

Google is phasing out Chrome support for third-party cookies and plans to replace them with privacy-preserving alternatives. Once that has occurred, the company “will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”

This explicit declaration comes as Google continues to “get questions about whether [it] will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers.”

Its Privacy Sandbox alternatives are focused on using aggregated and anonymized data, as well as on-device processing.

Update 05/03/2021:

What gets lost in here is that they plan to replace the third-party cookies with Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) API where “large groups of people with similar browsing patterns” are clustered together. 

Tests of FLoC show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising.

With that Google goes from controlling a giant chunk of the ad-targeting ecosystem to controlling virtually all of it.