How many times you’ve entered a website and got a prompt message asking you to enable cookies? Well, this will change soon according to a new announcement from Google. The search giant announced a couple of days ago that it would stop tracking users as they scroll the web. This has been doing for years through the so-called cookies. Further, the company promised to not design or use an alternative to cookies once it eliminates the use of its third-party cookies.
While this may be good news for those concerned with privacy, this does not mean that Google will stop using first-party information. This info is collected straight from the users when they visit sites and services controlled by Google. Moreover, the death of cookies does not mean that the company will cut its machinery used to identify the web’s denizens and ad servings. For the time being, this will remain as it is. Google Ads are here to stay and the company still needs a smart way to keep its ecosystem flowing.
The end of cookies means goodbye for an initial chapter in the internet story. For those who said goodbye to Flash Player recently, now it is time to say goodbye to another “character” that has been part of our everyday internet navigation. Computer-based web browsers defined an important period in the story with innovative creations and certainly, the “cookies” were some of those innovations.
The story of almighty cookies
The Cookies originally come as an invention by computer programmer Lou Montulli. He brought the first iteration of Cookies in 1994 and named them relating to “magic cookies” laid by scientists to routine computer operations. In the absence of these cookies, “each time a user clicked to move to a different page, they would become just another random user with no way to associate them with an action they had done just moments ago.” In other words, web-tracking.
Cookies opened the possibility for browsers to actually “know” and “remember” their users. They are the base-tool that popularized the web for greater marketing purposes. In the “commercial web”, cookies helped spawn a universe where personal privacy was easily breached allowing ads for thousands of products to appear on the homepages.
However, recent advancements in the industry have been leading to the end of cookies. Clients have spent years gathering at applications on mobile devices which do not accumulate web-based-cookie-tracking as efficiently as once the desktops did. Google’s Chrome browser, for instance, is on track to block these third-party cookies. Apple’s Safari Browser has introduced blocking cookies a little bit earlier.
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According to David Temkin, a Google executive: “People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web to get the benefits of relevant advertising. Google announced it would find alternatives to digital ankle bracelets, and advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising.”
The end of cookies does not mean the end of web-tracking
Since Google is ready to kill Cookies, we believe that it already has valid options for its profit-earning model based on advertisements. In fact, Google’s marketers have been preparing for this moment for quite some years now. They have developed alternative ways to track people surfing the web. Furthermore, the search giant has created digital tools as part of the “privacy sandbox” that caters to ads targeting like-minded groups of individuals.
So the end of cookies does necessarily mean that you will not be tracked in the web. Honestly, there is no way anymore to have “interactive browsing” without agreeing with certain terms.