After more than two decades, third-party cookies, or small files that advertisers use to monitor your browsing history and display targeted ads, are disappearing for good. By 2023, marketers won’t be able to track customers who use those cookies, in large part because Google is phasing out those trackers on Chrome, in part because the infamous tracking technology has become unpopular with the public over the years. Google Chrome is used by roughly two-thirds of all Internet users, and unlike browsers such as Safari or Firefox, it allows third-party trackers on its platform. Since 2020, Google has worked on a number of new potential replacement systems, but those proposals still have data and privacy concerns. Google’s first stab at a new system was called FLoC, or Federated Learning of Cohorts. Instead of tracking individual users’ browser history, FLoC would group users with similar interests and that group ads based on those shared interests. Experts noted that the system didn’t stop advertisers from showing aggressive ads on a one-to-one basis. A couple thousand, if you have more information on individual users, it’s really easy to re-identify it,” said Sarah Collins, senior policy advisor at Public Knowledge. “It takes a little more work to do with technologies like browser fingerprinting and others. Also, Cohort ID will really lead to personal identification again.” Google moved away from FLoC to a new system called Topics, which tells advertisers about a user based on 350 different categories such as fitness, sports or science. Those topics are kept for a few weeks until they are removed and replaced with new subjects. All that tracking happens on your device and not sent to an external server. Still, This has not sat well with data and privacy experts.” It looks like it will still enable discriminatory ads, violent ads, that sort of thing, and that’s the case with any effective behavioral advertising system,” said Bennett Cyphers, Electronic Frontier Federation staff technologist. that it’s going to enable those things because you can’t have something that richly targets people based on their behavior, without allowing you to target specific types of people who use specific types of ads may be sensitive to. Those two things are directly in conflict.” Experts told New Zealand that until Google and other ad servers would all be behavior-based
