Google announced today that it’s finally doing what everyone suspected and reversing its decision to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome. After repeated delays in a four-year-long saga, marketers and advertisers grew increasingly skeptical. In Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, 61% of B2C marketers said that they do not believe Google will deprecate the third-party cookie.

It’s not surprising that Google landed on this decision. The repeated delays highlighted major concerns and difficulties, primarily with its cookie-alternative solutions. Today’s decision does not impact Privacy Sandbox. Google says in its blog post, “We’ll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.”

This decision buys Google time — a lot of it! — to address key issues that the UK’s antitrust regulator and data privacy regulator have raised about Privacy Sandbox:

  • Privacy Sandbox is anticompetitive. Google singularly controls Privacy Sandbox. It can adjust how Privacy Sandbox operates, what data Privacy Sandbox makes available, and so on. Because of the considerable impact these decisions have on the rest of the advertising ecosystem, antitrust regulators are wary.
  • Consumer privacy disclosures are inadequate. As we’ve seen with cookie banners, trying to explain technical details clearly and concisely is no small feat. Regulators voiced concerns about how the disclosures explaining Privacy Sandbox and Topics API weren’t clear enough to educate a Chrome user on how their data would be collected and used.
  • Topics can be used for fingerprinting. Researchers have found that analyzing the three topics a user is interested in can provide enough data about a user to fingerprint and reidentify them. In a blog post, Apple voiced additional concerns about Topics API, such as the breadth of companies and services that can access a user’s Topics and the possibility of making broader inferences from a user’s Topics list.

What Advertisers Should Do Now

While regulators are creating the biggest headache for Google, they aren’t the only ones raising questions. Sixty-nine percent of B2C marketers say that they have concerns about the viability of Privacy Sandbox as a third-party cookie alternative. In light of Google’s latest announcement, advertisers should:

  • Just keep testing! Test contextual targeting, more compelling creative, and different identity resolution tactics. Yes, Google dominates the browser market, but consumers using Safari, Firefox, and other privacy browsers are already unreachable via third-party cookie. So, too, is anyone using privacy browser extensions in Chrome. Google may have killed all sense of urgency, but advertisers already have a significant portion of their audience operating in “cookieless” environments today.
  • Refine your data strategy. Identify what data you need about consumers to build look-alike models, segments, and propensity scores, then build a plan for acquiring that data. This data strategy will also come in handy when evaluating a data clean room partnership, ensuring that the data clean room ties to a defined use case and is aligned to business objectives.
  • Lean on publishers and buy direct. Third-party cookies were never the only way to “know your customer.” Publishers, too, know their customers — including their devices, browsers, and opt-in preferences. With seller-defined audiences, internal modeling capabilities, and supply-side platforms to help onboard and transact relevant identity tokens, publishers are ideally situated to help advertisers transition to a post-third-party cookie world.

If you’re looking for more guidance on operating in a data-deprecated world, check out our report, The State Of Data Deprecation, 2024. And as always, set up a guidance session for a deeper dive.