On January 4, 2024, an event happened that will go down in history, but is currently only understood by the internet industry. Last Thursday, Google announced that it was disabling cookies for 1% of its users — about 30 million people.
By the end of the year, cookies in Chrome, as we know them today, will be gone forever.
For privacy advocates and those who want to protect themselves from any form of surveillance, cookies have been the bane of the internet. For most of the history of the web, cookies (aka breadcrumbs) have been one of the primary ways tech companies track your behavior online. For targeted advertising and many other types of tracking, websites rely on cookies, which, by the way, are created by other companies (like Google). In the foreign segment of the internet, they are called “third-party cookies,” and they are built into the infrastructure of the global network. They are everywhere. If you visited positivnews.ru without an ad blocker (please add us to the adblock exception list) or any other tracking protection. Or maybe we ourselves provided you, or rather your browser, with some cookies. Sorry.
Back in 2019, news about privacy violations by Google, Facebook and other tech companies became so loud that Silicon Valley had to address this issue. Google, which makes the vast majority of its money by tracking you and showing you targeted ads, announced that it was starting a project to rid users of cookies in its Chrome. About 60% of the world’s internet users use Chrome, so Google’s abandonment of this technology would essentially destroy this method of data collection.