End of third-party cookies on Chrome: the outcome
The removal of third-party cookies on Chrome has been announced soon for two years… And will wait a long time! History, issues and future of these small tracers as discreet as they are profitable. What are cookies? Cookies were created in the 90s by Netscape for e-commerce sites to remember the items put in the shopping cart. Since then, their uses have diversified, extending to targeted advertising and content personalization. Today we distinguish two large families of cookies: essential cookies and non-essential cookies. Essential cookies and third-party cookies Essential or proprietary cookies Essential cookies are essential to the functioning of websitesmerchants in particular, and an optimal user experience, such as the shopping cart, authentication, and language. They are placed by the site visited and only follow navigation on this site. We also talk about first-party cookies. Non-essential cookies or third-party cookies Non-essential cookies, or third-party cookies, are placed by third-party companies, mainly for targeted advertising and audience measurement. These cookies track navigation across multiple websites. Facebook or TikTok pixels, for example, are part of third-party cookies. Advertisers, who wish to target Internet users, thus conclude agreements with publishers, who wish to monetize the advertising space that constitutes their site. The problems raised by third-party cookies Third-party cookies pose several problems, including: THE respect for privacy : they follow users across different websites without them always being aware of being followed, despite the consent banners. And advertising targeting sometimes considered abusive: they allow companies to create very detailed profiles based on very personal data and to distribute advertisements which can be intrusive. THE data security : data is shared between several sites, increasing the risk of leaks. THE user control : users have very little control over their personal data and their use. A problem of unfair competition between digital players. THE Digital Markets Act raises that “the processing, for the purposes of providing online advertising services, of personal data of third parties using essential platform services offers gatekeepers potential advantages with regard to data accumulation”. Cookies and the law For essential cookies, the regulations do not require obtaining user consent since they are necessary for navigation. For third-party cookies, it's a different story, which begins in 2013. As early as 2013, the CNIL, National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties, issued recommendations regarding user consent for third-party cookies. The first consent banners have appeared… Third-party cookies and the GDPR In 2018, the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, established therequirement for user consent : the banner allowing you to accept or refuse optional cookies has become widespread. Paywalls, paid versions of sites, have also appeared, in the event that the Internet user refuses cookies, the refused data representing a loss of income. The CNIL has nevertheless defined the conditions under which publishers can adopt this type of practice: offering an alternative (the paid version here), at a reasonable price. Third-party cookies and the Digital Services Act (DSA) In 2023, the DSA imposed: More transparency on how they use user data, including cookies. Reinforced consent: users must give explicit consent for the use of third-party cookies. Third-party cookies and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) In 2024, the AMD has also regulated the use of third-party cookies: Users should have control of their data and be able to easily refuse the use of third-party cookies Large platforms can no longer use data collected via third-party cookies in an anti-competitive manner. This means they must limit the use of these cookies, which are often used for targeted advertising. Access controllers must offer an alternative solution. The preamble to the DMA states: “The processing, for the purposes of providing online advertising services, of personal data of third parties using essential platform services offers gatekeepers potential advantages with regard to the accumulation of data, establishing This creates barriers to entry. Indeed, gatekeepers process personal data from significantly more third parties than other companies. (…) In order to prevent the contestability of essential platform services from being unfairly compromised by gatekeepers, they should allow end users to freely choose to adhere to such data processing and processing practices. connection by offering another possibility less personalized, but equivalent, and without making the use of the essential platform service or certain of its functionalities subject to the consent of the end user. Privacy Sandbox: Google's alternative to third-party cookies Since January 4, 2024, Google has been testing the limitation of online tracking with 1% of Chrome users: an important step in the project Privacy Sandbox aimed at the total deletion of third-party cookies. The idea: to create online advertising technologies that better protect users' privacy while allowing advertisers to serve relevant ads. The main components of Privacy Sandbox: Topics API allows interest-based advertising. Instead of tracking users individually, it groups users by interest groups. Advertisers target groups of users with similar interests without access to individual data. ENVIRONMENT : a targeting feature based on members' previous engagement. Ad serving decisions are made without sending personal data to external servers. API Assignment Reports measures ad effectiveness by relating ad interactions (like clicks) to conversions (like purchases) in an anonymous, aggregated manner, without revealing personally identifiable information. Consent mode allows websites to adjust the behavior of their Google tags based on user consent for advertising and analytics cookies. It respects users' privacy choices while allowing conversions to be measured in an aggregated manner. After a first version, the Consent mode v2 from Google improves the granularity of consents. The end of third-party cookies: why it's not so simple Deleting cookies primarily poses a problem for site publishers: it complicates the personalization of advertisements and the monitoring of user behavior, which can reduce the profitability of advertisements and therefore their income, at least initially. For large platforms like Google, the impact would be less severe. Beyond all the data to which they already have access, they have the necessary means to implement advantageous alternative solutions and compensate for a possible one-off drop in advertising investments. The end of third-party cookies on