Many marketing instructors have been telling their students for years that Google was getting rid of third-party cookies, which would have limited some popular and effective strategies used by digital marketers. Most of us have received advertising for a product we have shown interest in earlier, typically on a different website. These tactics are enabled by cookies, data packets saved to a user’s hardware that record what that person is doing online. Though tracking consumer internet activity does give marketers valuable information that can lead to higher conversion rates, it also has resulted in privacy concerns. Consumers do not like to be spied on, and when information is shared across platforms and businesses, it ups the creepiness factor for many of us. Apple has taken a proactive stance in protecting user privacy and removed third-party cookies from its Safari browser in 2017 and Google claimed to be planning the same for Chrome.
Google has spent six years (and a lot of money too) experimenting with ways to offer good advertising options for its digital marketing partners without using personal identification coming from tracking cookies. Some of its new ideas have shown only limited success in testing and faced regulatory hurdles as well, and pushback among digital marketers has been clear. So after multiple delays, Google announced this week that it will leave third-party cookie functionality as part of its Chrome browser. Google is the leader in search, with 2 in 3 customers using it, so detailed information about a shopper can be developed often from this source alone. The company was also planning to introduce an obvious opt-out option for these cookies this year, an idea that has also been scrapped because it was likely to have a huge impact as well. The company says that users can still disable tracking cookies in settings.
It is likely that timing has impacted this decision. Google has been facing legal problems, including being found a monopoly in both search (last summer) and advertising technology (this month) in the United States. It remains to be seen what regulators will demand, but adding any other disruptions to its business model is particularly unattractive now.
How do you feel about your activities being tracked online?
Activities:
- Ask students: Do you worry about online privacy? Do you use Safari or Chrome browsers for search? Does it matter to you if they have different policies toward third-party cookies?
- Have students search for information using a prompt like “how to avoid being tracked on chrome.” Summarize the findings. If you don’t want to be tracked, would you try some of these suggestions? What if there was a simple opt-out on Chrome – would you do that?
- Ask students to form small groups and do a search of their social media platforms. They should look for examples of advertising they believe was served to them based on prior activity online. Screen shot the ads and detail why they might have been served. How likely are they to purchase when they see these ads? How do they feel about receiving them?
Sources: Sloane, Garett, (22 Apr 2025) Google will keep cookies and skip opt-out option in Chrome—what it means for advertising and Privacy Sandbox, AdAge. Ikeda, Scott, (24 Apr 2025) Google Seemingly Surrenders on Third Party Cookies, Even As Privacy Sandbox Project Rolls On, CPOMagazine.com.
