Google wants to push cookies out of Chrome browser
In the future, it will be more difficult for advertisers to collect information about users' behavior while surfing the web. Following the actions of Apple and Firefox developer Mozilla against so-called cookies from data collectors, Google also wants to push them out of its Chrome web browser in the next two years.
Chrome dominates the market of programs for navigating the web with a share of more than 60 percent. This should seal the end of this type of data collection.
Cookies are small files that, for example, a website can place in the browser to recognize a user the next time they visit. But they can also be used to follow a person from website to website. Cookies from so-called third-party providers - such as data traders or advertising companies - are already blocked by default in Apple's Safari browser and Firefox. This is to protect the privacy of users.
Offer alternatives
Google, the world's largest advertising company, wants to take a more cautious approach with Chrome and, in a side swipe at the competition, chided that the "harsh" approach to cookies had given rise to alternatives that also encroached on users' privacy. These include, for example, so-called fingerprinting, in which computers are recognized by a combination of features such as technical data, connected external devices and installed fonts and tracked across the web.
Pointing to this, Google announced in August that instead of a large-scale crackdown on cookies, it wanted to work on alternatives in a "privacy sandbox" that would be more careful with privacy. Now the company expects the new approach to displace today's third-party cookies within two years.
At the same time, a side effect of the reorganization could be that it becomes more difficult, especially for Google's smaller competitors in online advertising, to display personalized ads to their users. (SDA)
