Skip to main content

False Alarm

 Whatever the new avatar of the Chrome third party cookie, it is all but given that it will be good for Google and not so much for the rest. It must be quite trippy to lead the world along saying you will be doing one thing, dance close to that thing you said you'll be doing, make it so everyone hates the thing you are almost close to doing that you said you'd be doing and then finally say never mind. 

I know of some folks who have spent the last several years getting ready for this day that never did come. Apart from wasting tons of their own resources going back and forth on this thing instead of doing useful stuff in the world, Google has wasted a lot of collective efforts by companies big and small globally. It would be interesting to do the math on the sum total of waste this aggravating Google caper has caused. I was talking to D about six months ago and he was super excited about leading his company's effort to survive and thrive after the third party cookie was deprecated. As is typical for D, he gave me an easy to understand explanation of what they were building and it was a clever technical solution that he was right to be proud of. When I first read this news, I wanted to ping him to get his reactions but decided a cooling off period may be wiser - he is likely pretty upset. 

Per Criteo's testing, Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the company’s suite of proposed cookie alternatives, would erase publishers’ ad revenues by 60%. The same should be true for other browsers like Firefox and Safari that have removed third party cookies but the impact is lower given that Chrome is used by over 63% of internet users. So many brain cells have been expended in trying to figure out how to compensate for signal loss and now it's a non-event - atleast the outcome that will happen is not the one these folks spent their years preparing for.



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more