Google announced a massive shift\u00a0last week in how it handles cookies, those pesky digital trackers that chase us around the internet and serve up targeted ads that are both creepy yet eerily precise reflections of our wants. The search giant, which just helped Alphabet Inc.\u00a0surpass a $1 trillion valuation, said it will eventually stop supporting third-party cookies in its ubiquitous Chrome browser.<\/p>\n
The move won\u2019t end the Big Brother era of Big Tech, but Google is framing the decision as a significant step away from unbridled data mining. In a\u00a0blog post, Google references privacy about a dozen times, an awkward pitch for a company that built a juggernaut of a business by tapping into cookies from its billions of users. Can Google, after pioneering and\u00a0protecting\u00a0an apparent invasion of privacy, sell its browser to consumers as a privacy-first service?<\/p>\n
Google is going to try. That\u2019s because the other browser makers are\u00a0embracing privacy\u00a0as a competitive advantage. Apple Inc. added\u00a0cookie restrictions to Safari several years ago. Microsoft Corp. has been building a raft of\u00a0tracking-prevention mechanisms\u00a0into its Edge browser. And Mozilla Corp. has made paid privacy tools a core selling point of its Firefox service, though they\u2019ve failed to catch on so far,\u00a0leading to job cuts\u00a0last week.<\/p>\n
When Google first introduced Chrome in 2008, it essentially\u00a0marketed\u00a0the new browser as an online operating system, one that would treat popular web services\u2014email, messaging, video streaming\u2014as full-blown applications, rather than clunky web pages. Chrome was a fast, refreshing alternative to Firefox and Internet Explorer. In the decade since, it has soared in popularity: Chrome today boasts 63% worldwide market share, according to\u00a0StatCounter.<\/p>\n
Chrome also became a huge source of data, facilitating an\u00a0ecosystem of Google\u00a0services that kept feeding its advertising engine with more user information. The browser\u2019s search box defaulted, of course, to Google, while users could log into the platform via Gmail to seamlessly access its products such Drive, Docs, Maps and YouTube, enabling the company to fill up\u00a0ever-more jars of cookies. The dominance of the browser\u00a0raised privacy concerns. One test last year found a\u00a0whopping 11,189 requests for cookies\u00a0in a week of surfing on Chrome. But\u00a0only recently\u00a0has Google started comprehensively rethinking its privacy policies, partly due to regulatory pressure and changing consumer sentiments around data collection.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsers are demanding greater privacy\u2014including transparency, choice and control over how their data is used\u2014and it\u2019s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands,\u201d Justin Schuh, director of Chrome engineering, wrote in the blog post last week.<\/p>\n
Google deserves a measure of credit for adopting consumer protections that could undermine its relationship with marketers and publishers, and also raise\u00a0further antitrust scrutiny. Still, such policies stop far short of ridding Google of ad-tracking altogether: They may simply end up increasing the value of so-called first-party cookies, which websites collect directly from their users, rather than through intermediaries. One company well-positioned to keep gobbling those up from its many devoted users?\u00a0Google.<\/p>\n
Google announced a massive shift\u00a0last week in how it handles cookies, those pesky digital trackers that chase us around the internet and serve up targeted ads that are both creepy yet eerily precise reflections of our wants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":217834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[32030,1137,985],"class_list":["post-335824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-alphabet","tag-google-chrome","tag-safari"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}