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Cookie Less

The cookie-less has been a long time coming but never quite arrives. It seems like a case of strategic procrastination and moving as slowly as possible without irking the authorities. It is no surprise that there are few fans of the privacy sandbox proposal. This post does a nice job of breaking down all the reasons not to love it. 

Google has its tendrils wrapped around every nook and cranny of the Internet, giving the company limitless opportunities to collect user first-party data. The rest of us are stuck with our minuscule (by comparison) first-party data sets or rely on exchanging or pooling data. 

But now that Google deactivated third-party cookies for 30 million Chrome users in early January of this year, we know they are totally super serious about this whole cookie deprecation thing.

Super-serious and in the name of protecting privacy too. The reality will be quite different no doubt and it will consolidate Google's position in the ads business. Ten years ago, marketers were wringing their hands over the dire cookie-less future, they made sporadic efforts to wean themselves off of cookie dependence but that future has yet to arrive but now it is tantalizingly close. The more everyone waffles over what they need to do in the post-cookie work, the greater the advantage to Google so the super-crawl pace of progress makes perfect sense. Much to learn along the way for Google by observing how the market reacts and responds - they get to adjust their strategy to their own advantage accordingly. What at first blush might look like a failure of vision might be the smartest thing ever. 

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