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Google eliminating cookies could protect privacy. It could also make life more annoying for you on the internet

Without cookies, a common online tracking tool, advertisers face a crisis and will start looking for other ways to track your behavior and habits on the internet, experts say.

A chocolate chip cookie lays on top of a keyboard on a red-colored surface.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University

Google recently started getting rid of third-party cookies, the tool that websites and advertisers use to track user behavior, on its Chrome browser, effectively kicking off what could be one of the most significant changes in online advertising.

Originally created in the early days of the internet to help websites remember who you are during login, cookies and the ways they facilitate online tracking have become a massive privacy concern. Google eliminated third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users, 30 million people, last week and aims to do so for all 3.2 billion of its users, according to Statista, by the end of 2024. 

Eliminating third-party cookies on Chrome, the largest web browser in the world, is Google’s first step toward a “privacy-first web” –– one that also involves its own replacement tracking tools as part of its new Privacy Sandbox. 

Google’s plan could improve privacy on the internet for billions of people, but it could also make life online more annoying in the process, says Christo Wilson, an associate professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University who specializes in online privacy and tracking.

It stems from what advertisers will have to do in order to pivot away from cookies as their primary form of tracking. They’ve already had to make do without cookies on browsers like Firefox and Safari, which cracked down on the tracking tool years ago. But “Chrome is the prize.”

“They still want to do individualized tracking, so there’s a bunch of annoying things that are going to start happening more frequently now that third-party cookies will be gone,” Wilson says.

If you use Chrome, one thing you will start seeing is a lot more websites asking for your email address and phone number. It’s data that has always been useful for spam attacks, but now advertisers and the websites that use them will turn to email addresses as a primary tracking identifier, Wilson says.

“Websites that have no business asking you to sign up for a newsletter or sign up for an account, they’re going to do it just because they want your email address so they can now do this broad tracking of your behavior everywhere,” Wilson says. “So, users are headed for a little bit more annoyance unfortunately.”

Some might even start to pivot to more invasive techniques like fingerprinting, Wilson adds, because, even after years of Google talking about and delaying its plan, the world of online advertising isn’t ready.

“They’ve known this change was coming for years, and they have not pivoted, so I think there’s a bunch of advertising companies that are going to be left flat-footed and are going to suffer,” Wilson says.

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