Chrome killed cookies for just one percent of users

Google is finally taking the next step in its multi-year plan to kill cookies in the Chrome browser.

As of January 4th, Google has disabled cookies for one percent of Chrome users, or about 30 million people. The company is starting small but plans to (mostly) remove cookies for all Chrome users by the end of the year.

The war on cookies began several years ago when tech giants like Google and Facebook (now Meta) began to receive increased scrutiny for various privacy issues. The use of third-party cookies was one of the things that received significant scrutiny. For those unfamiliar with cookies, they’re small files websites use to store some information in your web browser. Cookies have a variety of uses, such as allowing you to stay logged in or remembering what you stored in your cart.

But most of this useful functionality is performed by first-party cookies, which are operated by the website you’re browsing. Third-party cookies, on the other hand, come from other sites and are commonly used to track what people do online. These cookies are why your Google search for shoes turned into shoe advertisements on your favourite website. Naturally, third-party cookies represent a huge privacy problem and are also how companies like Google make a ton of money through online advertising.

At this point, you probably have two questions. First, if Google kills cookies in Chrome, won’t that hurt its ads business? And second, won’t killing cookies break tons of websites?

To answer the first one, Google has a plan to keep the gravy data train running: Privacy Sandbox. The Privacy Sandbox includes several complicated tools that boil down to a slightly more private method of tracking everything you do online and selling it. Through Privacy Sandbox, Chrome itself will act as the arbiter of data. The browser will track what you do and sort you into groups based on your activities, and then websites and advertisers can target ads to those groups.

The upside is that advertisers can’t learn about your specific browsing habits (without breaking the rules) but can still target their ads at people who are likely interested in their product. Going back to the shoe example, if you spend a lot of time browsing online sneaker communities, Chrome will probably sort you into a group of sneakerheads, and then shoe companies can target ads for their shoes to people in that group without seeing who is in the group or learning about their browsing habits.

Again, Privacy Sandbox is more private than third-party cookies, but the whole thing still relies on harvesting data to improve advertising, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

Will the cookie-pocalypse break my favourite sites?

As for the second part, killing cookies might break some websites, which is part of why Google is starting small. As part of the change, Chrome is getting new features that will allow it to detect if a website is having issues and disable Tracking Protection for that site. Users can also manually disable Tracking Protection by clicking on an eye logo in the URL bar.

That said, I doubt most people will have issues with broken websites. Someone somewhere is bound to have problems with something, but by and large, websites can get by without third-party cookies. How do I know? Other web browsers already dealt with this issue years ago. Firefox and Safari, for example, both blocked third-party cookies entirely (and didn’t add new tracking tools like Google) with minimal problems.

It’s also worth remembering that this stuff doesn’t apply to first-party cookies, which are more integral to website functionally and not used for tracking. These cookies aren’t going anywhere, even when Chrome officially kills cookies for everyone.

How to tell if Chrome killed your cookies

There are a few ways to tell if you’re among the lucky one percent of Chrome users blessed with no more third-party cookies. And, if you’re not part of that group, these methods will help you tell when Chrome finally does kill your cookies.

First, watch for a pop-up in Chrome about Tracking Protection. That should appear once you join the elite cookie-less Chrome users. Even if you miss the pop-up, watch for the eye logo in the URL bar that we mentioned above — it’s part of Tracking Protection and should be indicative if you’ve gone cookie-less.

Alternatively, you can check Chrome’s settings. In settings, there’s a ‘Privacy and security’ section, which should include a bunch of toggles related to cookies. If those are all turned on (and you didn’t turn them on yourself), you’re likely one of the chosen few with a cookie-less Chrome.

Via: Gizmodo