ACT I: It’s 2020. Google is starting to feel uneasy about the outrageous amount of spying their third-party cookies are enabling. Under pressure from regulators and government officials, they announce they will remove third-party cookies in their Chrome browser by 2022.
“People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web…” says Google’s Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust.
ACT II: It’s 2021. Google says they were only kidding about what people shouldn’t have to accept, and announce that they are not actually going to eliminate third party cookies for another two years. Meanwhile they are building out a questionable replacement for cookies called the Privacy Shitbox…oops, sorry, Privacy Sandbox.
While Google gets positive ink for setting this new deadline in the press (the NYTimes wrote, “Google Plans Privacy Changes, but Promises to Not Be Disruptive.”) a certain blogweasel is less than sanguine about the development.
“In their new “privacy initiative” Google is promising absolutely nothing except to continue their policies that enable the disreputable and illegal tracking of people across apps for at least two more years.”
ACT III: This week. Google announced that, once again, it was only kidding. Now third-party cookies on Chrome won’t be blocked until 2024. Anyone wanna bet? As a Google rival said, “Google is addicted to tracking, but Google also knows that tracking on the Web is on the way out, for both legal and ethical reasons. Unfortunately, instead of making the hard changes needed to become truly private, Google has again (and again) kicked the can down the road. The result is that Google continues knowingly and intentionally to subject their users to flagrant privacy harm.”
Just for laughs, let’s have another look at my favorite quote from Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai….
Beat The Liars
Don’t wait til 2024. Here’s how to turn off third-party cookies in your Chrome browser right now. Thanks to the great Don Marti for this:
Step 1: Open the Chrome browser. Click the three dot thing in the upper right corner.
Step 2: Click “Settings”
Step 3: In the left column click “Privacy and security”
Step 4: Click “Cookies and other site data”
Step 5: Click “Block third-party cookies”
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