Is Patience With the Cookie Crumbling?

Google has recently delayed abolishing third-party cookies on its browser to 2023. Once that year rolls around, Google will be following in the footsteps of Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, which have already removed the option from their products.

The move is a blow to marketing professionals who will then have to start purchasing detailed user behavior information from browser operators instead of being able to track all site visits a user makes on a certain browser via a tracking cookie. For users, however, the change might bring a heightened sense of privacy and one less option to consider when navigating a confusing cookie consent menu. First-party cookies which store info about browsing behavior on a specific website only will stick around, and with them the need for users to click consent ad nauseum.

Responses from a 2021 Statista Global Consumer Survey special highlight the general user confusion and complacency around cookies and cookie consent. Only around a quarter of Americans said that they understood cookie settings and only 36 percent said they deleted the tracking tokens regularly.

23 percent felt confused by cookie settings and didn’t want to deal with them, while 19 percent said they often didn’t like the options they were seeing. This leaves a complacent majority that doesn’t pay cookies much mind.

As an alternative to third-party cookies, Google will start offering third-party access to so-called “topics” in the future, which will disclose three favorite browsing topics of users to websites via the Google IPA.