Google is saying goodbye to cookies. This system, which for years has served to collect user data on behalf of users, has its days numbered: cookies will no longer be supported in Chrome by the end of 2023. This will eliminate one of the most long marketing lines available for 64.92% of all web traffic running on Chrome.
The company has announced the planned dates for phasing out cookies as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, which will take place in two phases starting in late 2022 and mid-2023. The future is controversial FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which has already encountered opposition from some companies and is actually being investigated by the European Commission.
Margrethe Vestager, VP Competition at the European Commission, has said the EC is concerned “that Google has made it difficult for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ‘ad tech exercise’.”
The tourism industry is preparing for change as marketers will no longer be able to use third-party cookies for site data collection, retargeting and ad serving. According to Sojern, cumulative flight and hotel searches, future hotel bookings and financial information can reveal broader industry trends to help marketers tailor campaigns to overall wants and needs.
Using marketing performance combined with current inventory data, marketers can target past guests who have stayed at the property or those who have stayed in recent months and indicate intent to stay again. Travolution explains that by leveraging historical booking data, including online and offline purchases, marketers can see who is a repeat traveler and create a tailored experience to build brand loyalty.
Google insists that the Privacy Sandbox aims to establish a set of open standards to improve privacy on the web, which also provide greater transparency and control over how data is used. In practice, this means that cookies will be replaced by the new paradigm imposed by FLoC, a system that groups users with the same interests and thus allows them to theoretically hide specific user data without harming them or advertisers, who can continue to target specific audiences. interests.
To achieve this, Google already has a roadmap in which it proposes two stages in which their Chrome browser will stop supporting cookies:
- Phase 1 (from late 2022): after tests are completed and APIs are launched in Chrome, this phase will begin in which publishers and the advertising industry will have “the necessary time to migrate their services” . This phase is expected to last nine months, during which time technology adoption and feedback will be monitored before moving to Phase 2.
- Phase 2 (starting in mid-2023): Chrome will begin phasing out third-party cookies over a three-month period, until they are completely eliminated by the end of 2023.
Google’s goal is to achieve the total elimination of cookies in Chrome by the end of 2023. The deadline is therefore long, but this proposal faces criticism from some companies such as Brave, DuckDuckGo or a Mozilla that doubts that it really protects privacy.
Other entities such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) describe FLoC as “a terrible idea”, but if there is a major obstacle it may be imposed by the European Commission, which is investigating the initiative.
