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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.



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