This should be the central argument the DOJ uses to separate Chrome from Google: The entire web for a monopoly-size portion of users is massively less secure because the web browser is owned by a company which is very vested in it being less secure.
Honestly I’m surprised Google hasn’t offered to buy Truth Social for a few hundred million just to make this little antitrust problem go away.
From TFA: "Until today, Google was still planning to roll out a dialog in Chrome that would prompt users to turn off third-party cookies in favor of Google's updated solution. […] …Google won't be pushing that cookie dialog to users. You can still choose to disable third-party cookies in Chrome, though."
Google is saying they’re fine with no third party cookies. The rest of the industry needs them.
How do you protect user privacy while also not killing googles competitors? Which need is more important?
I'm guessing the reason google doesn't use third party cookies is because they get higher quality data from people being signed in to Google services, and that is independent of whether they are using Chrome or not.
There's no reason they couldn't allow add-ons to do it: but instead with manifest v3 I think it is impossible to do it in a general way isn't it? Like with the other ad-blocking you have to have a hardcoded number of rules you can define for blocking cookies in the requests as well, at least through the declarativeNetRequest API.
Maybe it is possible for through one of the cookies APIs, but the cookie's API has race conditions where the site can still sometimes see them from what I understand and redirects can activate before your extension gets a chance to respond.
And then of course extensions don't even run on mobile and that isn't an accident.
I do disagree with your cause and effect though, they have gotten blocked from replacing third party cookies with privacy sandbox because it replaces a standard everyone can use equally with a Google-controlled system. They could have cited the industry standard to block third party cookies in other browsers and done so without a replacement, the reason they are being prohibited from doing so is because they are motivated to maintain data access for themselves via privacy sandbox.
You can read countless statements from the Chrome team about Privacy Sandbox where they state how vital spying on users for ad targeting is, they've never "wanted" to remove doing so.
Those statements about tracking you're referencing are legal shielding against antitrust suits from adtech competitors.
Google was attacked on both sides, on the one hand by adtech who objected to being forced by Google to use something less powerful than third party cookies, and on the other hand by other browser vendors who objected to adding adtech features and certainly didn't have any interest in helping Google avoid their antitrust problem, regardless of the fact that enabling Google to turn off third party cookies would be the better privacy outcome for users of Chrome. They had no interest in helping Chrome users; they preferred to promote alternatives instead.
This is ignoring the facts. Last summer it was made clear that no privacy-increasing replacement for 3p cookies was going to be acceptable to the CMA.
So Google's announced plan was to make 3p cookies an opt-in feature, with a dialog forcing users to make the choice. That plan was not conditional on any of the privacy sandbox replacement mechanisms. (Your guess is as good as mine for what option the average user would choose when forced to.)
But clearly even informing the users and having them make a choice was unacceptable to the CMA.
And no, they cannot just act unilaterally citing precedence in other browsers like you study. Regulators aren't going around threatening to break up Apple or Mozilla, so they get to do whatever they want. Google does not have that luxury.
(And none of the privacy sandbox projects for ad targeting without 3p cookies was giving Google some additional data source denied from other advertisers, like you claim.)
I guess that was going to be too insane to actually manage.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2024/03/05/new-privacy-p...