Member-only story
Pattern Matching
Google’s ‘Privacy-First Web’ Is Really a Google-First Web
Why the search giant can afford to kill the cookie
For two decades, the cookie has been an emblem of the online advertising model that powers much of the open web — and the privacy invasions that come with it. Now, the cookie as we know it is dying.
Online advertising will live on, of course, and so will privacy invasions. But the changes taking shape today will nonetheless alter how we navigate the web in the future — and define which companies dominate it.
The Pattern
The internet’s giants are building its post-cookie future.
Google has been planning for a while now to phase out third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome browser, deprecating those bits of code that track and tattle on your browsing history for the sake of targeted advertising. It promised in January 2020 that they’d be gone by 2022. And we’ve known since 2019 that it was working on less-intrusive ways to target ads.
This week, Google committed not to build or use any systems that track individual people across the web. That means Google won’t support some of the nascent efforts by other ad-tech players to replace cookies with technologies that track an…
