‘It does leave one question slightly unanswered’: Industry reacts to Google abandoning cookie quest
Google has abandoned its four-year voyage to eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome, instead proposing a one-time opt-in cookies prompt that will allow the user to decide how they are tracked while using Chrome. But what does the rest of the industry think about this? Well, rather than speculate – we just asked them.
Antonio Panuccio, head of data and technology at Enigma
I think there’s been a communal lift in the industry as everyone breathes a sigh of relief from this news. However, this ought to be treated as yet another reprieve in the timeline rather than an excuse to cease privacy-preserving action. The cookie is still getting stale, audience addressability will continue to be a growing concern, and this fork in the road is still just a proposal. We’re yet to know where things are going to go in a year or two, but that might be why that sigh of relief is so powerful today: because this seems to bring a level of certainty (in being able to fall back into the ways of old) rather than the ambiguity we’ve become accustomed to.
With this news, we think we’ll see is a re-shuffle of priorities with adaptation efforts to third-party cookie loss dropping down the list but not disappearing. It’s still incredibly important for brands to put the pieces in place to secure, own, and operationalise their own data rather than relying on black boxes, and it’s very hard to stop that progress once you’ve started. In Australia, those efforts are intrinsically linked to growing concerns around cybersecurity and the to-be-legislated Privacy Act revamp.
However, while we all advocate for first-party data to reign supreme over third-party cookies, we’re all still invested in the Privacy Sandbox and related efforts to be a success. Growth for businesses can’t come from first-party data alone, particularly when it comes to new customer acquisition. Google still needs to deliver a robust alternative to the third-party cookie in the Privacy Sandbox, and without the timeline pressure, we might see something a little more palatable for all stakeholders.
