After telling advertisers and affiliate networks for several years that Google would be ending the use of 3rd party tracking cookies, they just announced last week that instead they will make cookie tracking optional inside of Chrome.
This however is effectively almost the same as turning off cookie tracking as when one looks to what happened with Apple doing the same, most customers turned off the option for tracking their web usage, making the use of cookies barely useful. Industry sources at Ad Age spoke to an unnamed ad exec who noted:
“This is the worst of all worlds. This just creates more chaos and uncertainty because it sounds like Google still plans to make as-yet-unspecified changes to Chrome that will impact third-party cookies, even if they aren’t formally deprecated, and changes to Privacy Sandbox that the rest of the ecosystem will have to accommodate.
So cookies will still mostly go away, but now in an unpredictable fashion over an unspecified time horizon, and we will deal with yet more changes to Privacy Sandbox.”
Those who use programmatic advertising are the ones most impacted by this change as to what the future will bring with this. In the long run, cookies are older technology that we expect to disappear in the near future though a substantial number of parties are still using them for tracking.