We admit it. We're a bit disappointed about Google again postponing the deprecation of third-party cookies. The original plan was to get rid of cookies in Google's Chrome browser by 2022, then delayed to 2023, and is now kicked further down the road to Q3 2024. Google explains it with a need for more time to "evaluate and test" solutions within the Privacy Sandbox in order to roll out privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other forms of cross-site tracking.
A Decaying Legacy Business Gets More Time
Following the announcement, many adtech heavy-weights made their disappoint-ment known, including ExchangeWire CSO Ciarán O’Kane:
"Kicking the “privacy can” down the road helps nobody. We already have an industry heavily indexed for programmatic marketing on Chrome. That’s just 50% of the web. Traders are telling us that barely 60% of that is actually addressable due to people using incognito and activating aggressive privacy settings. That means a multi-billion dollar addressable market is only interested in 30% of the open web. All we are doing is giving a decaying legacy business more runway. Google needed to be brave and accelerate the timeline to a privacy-first era - but as usual it bottled it."
The Ghost of Personalization
In a comment, our CDO Ulrik Larsen says:
"It's disappointing to us that Google again postpones alternatives to tracking consumers by third-party cookies. Nevertheless, Privacy Is Not Postponed. And we keep up the good fight for data privacy as we go on providing agencies and advertisers with the tool to create respectful insight-driven targeting."
You are welcome to reach out to Ulrik.
The IDFree.com targeting tool offers advertisers exactly that all-important in-depth insight into their unique target audiences - built by us or by our client's teams - without collecting the individual data consumers leave behind in their online footprints.
Our targeting tool allows users to enrich privacy-safe census data (offline socio-demographic data per given population) with lifestyle topics and life phases data, and then get instant validation of whom is targeted before (!) activating the same (!) audience on all online channels.
Want to know more? Please reach out to us.