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Feeling the pressure from competing browser developers, Google on Tuesday laid out a plan to drop Chrome support of tracking cookies within two years.
The plan is laid out in a post titled "Building a more private Web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete." It articulates a shift from a stance Chrome developers took in August, when they warned that the blocking of support for third-party cookies—which allow advertisers to track people as they move from site to site—would encourage the use of an alternative tracking method. Known as browser fingerprinting, it collects small characteristics of a browser—for instance, installed fonts or plugins, screen size, and browser version—to uniquely identify the person using it. Unlike cookies, fingerprinting is harder to detect, and user profiles can't be easily deleted.
Instead, Google's August post unveiled the "privacy sandbox," a proposed set of open standards that would serve as an alternative to the blocking of third-party cookies. Privacy sandbox uses browser-based machine learning and other techniques to determine user interests and aggregate them with other users. Google—whose ad-driven revenue model strongly favors ads that target individuals' interests and demographics—said the proposed standard would allow advertisers to deliver more relevant ads without allowing them to track individual users.
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