But as the technology advanced, social media took off and consumers’ lives were lived increasingly online, it got creepy. Privacy advocates have always criticised the model, and more and more regular people have become aware of the issue, some expressing their displeasure by downloading ad blockers.

Google isn’t the first to make this change. Apple in 2017 started limiting and eventually blocking third-party cookies completely from its Safari browser. Mozilla’s Firefox followed soon after. But those two browsers make up less than 20 per cent of the market, according to research firm eMarketer.

Despite Google’s own reliance on advertising and tracking for roughly $US180 billion a year in revenue, chief executive Sundar Pichai admitted during a 2019 congressional hearing that people don’t like to feel they’re being tracked around the internet. And in January 2020, Google said it too would block third-party cookies on Chrome within the next two years.

Some of Google’s advertising technology competitors say the move isn’t about privacy at all, but a way to hurt its rivals and push advertisers toward Google’s YouTube and search ads, which don’t need cookies to effectively target people.

“You can fix your public perception while at the same time cementing your own dominance and growing your own market share,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of AdProfs, an independent advertising technology consulting firm. “It seems like a no-brainer.”

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A Google spokeswoman pointed to a company blog from March, where Marshall Vale, a product manager, said the company’s goal is to make cookies obsolete while also helping web publishers grow their businesses. Finding that balance is “critical to keep the web open, accessible and thriving for everyone,” Vale said.

Google can block cookies in Chrome relatively easily because it designs and controls the browser’s underlying code. To replace them, Google’s engineers have marched out a menagerie of bird-themed acronyms like FLOC, FLEDGE and TURTLEDOVE to describe their proposals for advertising without cookies.

The ideas are working their way through the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, an international group of tech companies that debates and sets rules for how the Web works. However, Google doesn’t actually need to get approval from the rest of the W3C’s membership. Since its browser is the biggest in the world, it can simply make new rules and web developers will have to follow them or risk seeing their websites stop working on Chrome.

“Google using the W3C letterhead to do this stuff makes it seem less like a Google power play,” said Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave, a browser that competes with Google’s Chrome.

The most fleshed-out idea so far is FLOC, which stands for federated learning of cohorts. Under FLOC, instead of letting websites drop cookies into an individual’s browser, the browser itself watches what they do online. It then uses artificial intelligence to assign them to a cohort of several thousand people that the AI determines are interested in the same kinds of products. Then, instead of buying access to individual people, advertisers pay for ads to show up for users in a specific cohort.

Cohort IDs refresh every week, so they’re based on the most recent browsing behaviour.

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In the old world, websites would constantly be pulling up information about you based on the cookies trailing behind you. Now, the only identifying information your browser would present is which cohort you’re in. Google says this system is 95 per cent as effective at getting clicks as old-school cookie ads are for advertisers.

But Google’s Chrome browser is still monitoring every website you visit and feeding that into its algorithm, even if the information stays on your device. For those who want less surveillance from tech companies, it might feel like a step in the wrong direction.

“The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process,” Bennett Cyphers, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a March report on Google’s cookie replacements. “It hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model.”

Still, compared to other proposals from the rest of the ad-tech industry, Google’s is arguably the best one for privacy, Vidakovic said.

“They’re trying to balance commercial needs with user privacy needs at the same time,” he said. “Despite their flaws, I think the concept behind FLOC and anonymous cohorts are a good balance.”

The debate over cookies is a major reminder of just how much our online behaviour is being tracked and recorded by dozens of private companies. It also shows how many companies have a stake in that reality.

Targeted advertising has grown up alongside the internet, and helped create giants such as Facebook and Google, but also fostered an ecosystem of thousands of companies employing hundreds of thousands of people. When companies such as Google make changes to how products used by billions of people work, there are consequences.

Getting rid of cookies completely could hurt news publishers and e-commerce start-ups, decreasing the number of voices online and pushing up prices for consumer products. It could also increase privacy and move the internet in the direction of less surveillance overall.

None of this has been fully decided, and keeping track of the big changes made by companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple over the next several years will be key to understanding how our online lives are recorded, packaged and sold.

The Washington Post

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