We thought that 2024 was going to be a good year for privacy. Google promised to finally do away with cookies, those small files that websites use to spy on us on the Internet, and that its alternative, Privacy Sandbox, was going to live up to its name. Far from reality, the cohort-based alternative has been a complete failure, and Google has given us the worst news it could give us in this regard.
When you visit a website, it creates a cookie, a small file with an ID that identifies you as you travel around the Internet. If this website loads some elements from other websites, it will also create cookies for those websites, which will have a unique ID that will be used to identify you. Websites know our IDs, and using them they can follow us wherever we go on the Internet, find out what pages we visit, what our tastes and interests are, and much more.
The idea behind cookies is not bad, but they are misused to abuse them and collect more information than necessary from users. Therefore, Google, taking advantage of its privileged position on the Internet, tried to put an end to these cookies by creating its own alternative, an option that, by providing the same information to the websites that require it, can be much more private for users: this is how Privacy Sandbox was born.
Instead of creating a unique ID for each user that can be used to identify them on the Internet, this feature adds users to different groups based on their interests, the websites they visit, and other factors. In this way, websites receive the IDs of the groups to which each user belongs based on their browsing history, but do not provide a unique ID.
The idea is not bad, but it has not convinced.
Google will continue to bet on cookies
Initially, the blocking of cookies and the use of Privacy Sandbox was to begin this year. However, the Internet giant has finally had to backtrack and announce that it will continue using classic cookies.
The reason for this is not entirely clear. Although there are probably other hidden interests at play, the Google boss has confirmed on his blog that it is due to performance problems. In order to process all the information and create an infrastructure that can handle it, much more work and more resources are needed for everything to work properly.
Google has therefore confirmed that it will continue to use cookies, even if this means a problem for users’ privacy. However, at least there will be some changes in the way it uses these cookies. For example, users will be notified of the use of these cookies, and they will also have more control over them.
The Internet giant also says it will continue to work on Privacy Sandbox and invest large amounts of money to fix its problems and try to implement it again in the future. However, despite these promises, we believe that cookies have won. And that is bad news for privacy.
