Chrome is killing cookies
It’s no secret that Google wants to control as much as the online advertising market as possible. Now they are leveraging the immense popularity of the Chrome browser to serve those goals. Basically, over the course of this year, Google will be slowly shifting the information online advertisers are allowed to access about Chrome users from standard third-party cookies to a proprietary system in which Google processes the data about the user before handing it over to the advertiser.
This is bad news for users and for advertisers. For users who do usually consent to cookies tracking them online so their ads can be more relevant, their ads will become less relevant following this change as the advertisers will have less information about them from which to draw inferences. For users who don’t usually consent to tracking, this is yet another form of tracking you’ll be automatically opted into that you’ll have to manually opt out of (if Google even provides an option) or better yet, you may have to switch web browsers to avoid it. For advertisers who aren’t Google, all the sudden they will be dependent on data Google collects and controls to do their business, strengthening Google’s monopoly on internet advertising, and causing numerous negative knock-on effects down the road.
This is all following an earlier aggressive move I saw Chrome make earlier this year, opting-in users by default to a new proprietary tracking system in which Chrome uses all your web browsing history to make suggestions to advertisers about your interests. If you didn’t know about this relatively recent Chrome feature and you want to turn it off, you can follow these instructions.
I know it’s unrealistic to ask everyone to stop using Chrome at this point, but I am urging people to consider alternatives if possible for them. If you’re on a Mac, Safari is really good. Brave browser has a lot of privacy protecting features. Firefox is an open-source classic. Vivaldi is one of my personal favorites, and it’s based on Chromium, the same open-source engine that runs Google Chrome. Vivaldi provides user-friendly features and support like what Google adds to Chromium to make Google Chrome, but without all the Google control and oversight.
