The truth about cookies and privacy

What is a Cookie?

In the following lines, we will attempt to uncover the truth about cookies and privacy, but let’s start at the beginning: What is a cookie?

Cookies were born as a tool to facilitate user navigation (allowing passwords to be autofilled or websites to remember payment information), but in recent times, they have become the ultimate mass marketing weapon. Cookies are small pieces of code that "jump" from websites and lodge themselves in your browser, allowing the new sites you visit to see where you have been before.

The cookie revolution arrived with the emergence of social networks, where consumers' lives left an increasingly complete and precise information trail regarding their personality, hobbies, tastes, needs, and ideology. However, privacy advocates have always criticized this model.

Truths About Cookies and Privacy: Facebook, Google, and Apple

As noted in a Washington Post article from June 24, 2021, Facebook and Google use cookies to display ads across the web based on information collected on their own sites and social networks. But all of that is changing. In 2020, Google committed to completely blocking cookies in its Chrome browser—used by approximately 70% of desktop users worldwide—by the end of 2023. Google is developing solutions to allow advertisers to continue showing relevant ads while protecting user privacy.

But Google is not the first to make this move. In 2017, Apple began limiting and eventually blocking third-party cookies in its Safari browser, and Mozilla's Firefox followed shortly after. Since then, Apple has marketed its privacy features aggressively, presenting itself as a privacy leader that does not need to collect data to fuel an advertising business like Google. However, Apple does collect some user data and uses it to sell targeted ads in its App Store, even though its advertising business is much smaller than Google's.

What is Google's Cookie-Free Solution?

The most developed idea by Google so far to utilize user data without the need for cookies is FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). With FLoC, the browser observes an individual's browsing behavior and uses Artificial Intelligence to assign them to a group (or cohort) of several thousand people interested in the same types of products.

Then, instead of buying access to specific individuals, advertisers pay for ads to be shown to users in a specific cohort. The only identifying information your browser would present is the cohort you belong to. In this way, Google attempts to balance commercial needs with user privacy. However, you would see practically the same type of ads as you do now, and the feeling of being "followed" across the web would likely remain very similar.

What Does This Mean for Competitors?

Cookies are not owned by a specific company; they are a generic technology that anyone can use to track people and show them ads. Google's FLoC establishes the rules for how advertisers can interact with people using Chrome.

Several major companies have shown their rejection of Google’s proposals, such as Amazon, which currently prevents Chrome from collecting data on users visiting its websites. At the same time, politicians and antitrust researchers in several countries have raised alarms, fearing Google’s move could harm competitors and further consolidate its power. For instance, the UK competition authority set out to investigate FLoC to "assess whether the proposals could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated in Google's ecosystem at the expense of its competitors."

What Does This Mean for Me and My Privacy?

The debate over cookies is a reflection of how our online behavior is tracked and recorded by numerous private companies. Targeted advertising has grown alongside the Internet and helped create giants like Facebook and Google, but it has also fostered an ecosystem of thousands of organizations.

When companies like Google make changes to how products used by millions of people work, there are inevitably large-scale consequences. Getting rid of cookies entirely could harm news publishers and e-commerce startups, potentially reducing editorial diversity and increasing consumer prices. Conversely, it could also increase privacy and move the Internet toward a direction of less overall surveillance.

It is necessary to closely follow the changes that companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple will implement in the coming years to understand how our digital footprint is recorded, packaged, and sold—and whether these moves are truly intended to better protect our privacy.