Third-Party Cookies Have Got to Go ⇥ w3.org

Anthony Chavez, of Google:

[…] Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.

Oh good — more choices.

Hadley Beeman, of the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group:

Third-party cookies are not good for the web. They enable tracking, which involves following your activity across multiple websites. They can be helpful for use cases like login and single sign-on, or putting shopping choices into a cart — but they can also be used to invisibly track your browsing activity across sites for surveillance or ad-targeting purposes. This hidden personal data collection hurts everyone’s privacy.

All of this data collection only makes sense to advertisers in the aggregate, but it only works because of specifics: specific users, specific webpages, and specific actions. Privacy Sandbox is imperfect but Google could have moved privacy forward by ending third-party cookies in the world’s most popular browser.