What is a cookie?
What is a cookie? In the following lines we will try to reveal the truth about cookies and privacy, but let's start at the beginning: What is a cookie?
Cookies were born as a tool to make browsing easier for users (allowing passwords to be automatically filled in, or websites to remember payment information), but in recent times they have become the ultimate mass marketing weapon. Cookies are small snippets of code that jump off websites and lodge themselves in your browser causing new sites you visit to see where you've been before.The cookie revolution came with the emergence of social networks where consumers' lives were leaving a trail of increasingly complete and accurate information about their personalities, hobbies, tastes, needs, ideology... However, privacy advocates have always criticised this model.
Some truths regarding cookies and privacy: Facebook, Google and Apple.
As a June 24, 2021 Washington Post article picked up, Facebook and Google use cookies to display ads on the web based on information collected from their own sites and social networks. But all that is changing. In 2020 Google pledged to completely block cookies in its Chrome browser, which is used by about 70% of desktop users worldwide, by the end of 2023. Google is developing solutions to allow advertisers to continue to display relevant ads while protecting users' privacy.
But Google is not the first to make this change. In 2017 Apple began limiting and eventually blocking third-party cookies from its Safari browser and Mozilla's Firefox followed soon after. Since that time Apple has marketed its privacy aggressively, presenting itself as a privacy leader that doesn't need to collect data to fuel an advertising business like Google and that's because Apple collects some of its users' data and uses it to sell targeted ads in its app store, even though its advertising business is much smaller than Google's.What is the solution of Google without cookies?
The most developed idea by Google so far to employ user data without cookies is FLOC (Federated Learning Of Cohorts), something like "Federated Learning Of Cohorts (Groups)". With FLOC the browser observes the browsing behaviour of individuals and uses Artificial Intelligence to assign them to a group of several thousand people who would be interested in the same types of products. Then, instead of buying access to individual people, advertisers pay for ads to be shown to users in a specific group or cohort: the only identifying information your browser would present is the cohort you are in. In This way Google tries to balance the commercial needs with the user's privacy needs. However, you would see virtually the same type of ads as you do now, and the feeling of being tracked on the Web would probably be much the same as it is today.
What does this mean for me and my privacy?
Cookies are not owned by a specific company, they are a generic technology that anyone can use to track people and show them ads. Google's FLOC sets rules for how advertisers can interact with people using Chrome.
Some major companies have shown their rejection of Google's proposals, such as Amazon, which currently prevents Chrome from collecting data about users who visit its websites. At the same time politicians and antitrust investigators in several countries have raised the alarm that Google's move could harm competitors and further consolidate its power: the UK competition authority is set to investigate FLOC and Google's ideas to "assess whether the proposals could drive advertising spend further into Google's ecosystem at the expense of its competitors".
What does this mean for me and my privacy?
The cookie debate is a reflection on how our online behaviour is being tracked and recorded by numerous private companies. Targeted advertising has grown with the Internet and has helped create giants like Facebook and Google, but it has also fostered an ecosystem of thousands of organisations, and when companies like Google make changes to the way products that millions of people around the world use work, there are obviously large-scale consequences. Getting rid of cookies altogether could hurt news publishers and e-commerce startups, which would reduce the diversity of editorial lines and increase the prices of consumer products. It could also increase privacy and move the Internet in the direction of less surveillance overall.
The changes that companies like Google, Facebook and Apple will implement in this direction over the next few years need to be closely watched to understand how our digital footprint is recorded, packaged and sold and whether they are really intended to better protect our privacy.
