July 2024 update: Google scraps plans to deprecate third party cookies in Chrome (after years of promising to do so).
See below for prior updates before the July 2024 announcement, which are no longer in motion.
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Google has announced a 2023 deadline to deprecate cookies and no longer support third-party tracking cookies.
Click here to watch a quick video where we discuss this: https://support.vicimediainc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/GoogleFlOCCookies.mp4
Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is part of a larger strategy of creating a “Privacy Sandbox” with open standards for tracking users while protecting their privacy. Google launched its “Privacy Sandbox” initiative to find a solution that protects user privacy and lets content remain freely available on the open web.
Being tested by Google are several cookie replacement ideas:
- First there was FLoC – which stands for “federated learning of co-horts.” The ideas was to place people into cohorts or buckets based on their browsing history – in other words, replacing the third-party cookie with a FLoC ID. This concept has now evolved into the Topics API.
- Topics API, replaces FLoC and is in beta as of early 2022. It would allow companies to personalize ads based on a limited number of regularly updated content topics as determined by the browser. Topics API uses on-device machine learning. None of the data processing happens on an external server, including Google servers. But unlike FLoC, which generated a cluster ID to reflect a given Chrome user’s browsing patterns, the Topics API allows Chrome to determine up to five topics – think things like fitness, travel, books, team sports or rock music – that represent a person’s top interests for a certain week across participating websites. When someone visits a participating site, the Topics API picks three topics for targeting purposes – one topic from each of the past three weeks – and shares them with that site and its advertising partners to personalize ads to that person. Shared topics are persistent to a website and only remain active for three weeks. Then they’re deleted, and fresh topics are added in their place. The API supplies multiple topics so they can be combined (for example, targeting a book lover who is also into fitness). While similar to contextual (keyword) targeting Topic API would be more specific. The Topics API could be used to target a fitness lover on a news site regardless of whether someone is reading about fitness.
- FLEDGE, which stands for “first locally-executed decision over groups experiment,” is the Privacy Sandbox’s answer to Retargeting. The purpose is to allow remarketing to brand-specific cohorts of users without allowing third parties to track browsing behavior across sites.
- The attribution reporting API or, more officially, the Core Attribution API, is meant to support view-through and click-through conversions.
So in essence, Topics would be for targeting, FLEDGE would be for Retargeting, Core Attribution is for measurement.
Other ad tech companies have been working together on other types of solutions. Unified ID 2.0, an initiative that some top ad-tech firms are working on together, would rely on email addresses that are hashed and encrypted from consumers who give their consent. LiveRamp also has what it calls its “Authenticated Traffic Solution,” which it says involves consumers opting in to gain control of their data, and on the other side, brands and publishers being able to use that data.
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