Google to phase out Third Party Cookies

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small bit of text placed on the hard drive of your computer by the server of a website that you visit. The cookie is placed there for the purpose of recognizing your specific browser or remembering information specific to your browser, were you to return to the same site. The information from a cookie can also be used by its owners for marketing and advertising purposes.

A “third-party cookie”, is one stored on your computer by a website different to the one you are visiting at that time.

In a statement released earlier today Justin Schuh, director of Chrome engineering at Google, confirmed that Google will be ending the use of TPCs within two years.

TPCs have been controversial, as, while they can produce forms of real-time advertising that people generally like, they can also allow a huge number of organisations to gather data – personal and otherwise – from which they can use and profit, largely without the knowledge of the person that they have obtained the data from.

Ultimately, this means that companies will only be able to derive data from their own domains and website sites. They will not be able to gather information from other interviews. Google describes it as a “privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms” that will maintain “an ad-supported web.”

What does this mean?

On the face of it, this broadly seems like a good thing. Huge sources of third-party data sold to adtech companies will become unsustainable to hold or buy. It’s a step towards a safer and more customer-focused internet. Similarly, it will stop rogue sites using data-gathering functions possible through cookies that can permit them to gather illegal data.

But, the abolition of TPCs will have a huge impact on sites that seek to advertise across the web. If they cannot track which sites customers are visiting, it becomes harder to market to them with confidence beyond sites that have a bountiful supply of ‘first-party data’.

As one might expect, sites with first-party data are those who already hold a huge share of the market on the internet.

Nonetheless, Google claims they want to help find solutions to this. Google Sandbox is collaborating with industry to find out ways to help advertisers organise and track their campaigns. One solution would see the use of a browser sandbox, which is not accessible to the advertiser, to store signals such as clicks or conversions and strictly measure out those signals in ways that anonymize the user. The direct signal from the user's browser to the ad tech/marketing cloud is severed, and instead, the browser does some measure of limitation, obfuscation and anonymization before any data is returned.

It is still early days and alternatives are yet to be created. Nonetheless, this announcement is certainly a watershed moment for how advertising and marketing is done online.