When the third-party cookie crumbles: A new privacy-centric internet emerges

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

“How will the internet operate without cookies?”

“When are they going?”

“Which ones are getting eliminated?”

For the last six months, Rinku Ghosh has been fielding queries like these from clients panicking about the phasing out of third-party cookies. Ghosh is the COO of Lemnisk, a Bengaluru-based customer data platform. In her line of work, a cookie isn’t a sweet treat; it is a text file spawned by a web browser when a user visits a site, capturing their login details, preferences and browsing history.

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The host site stores this data as first-party cookies, to make the user’s next visit more personalised. However, since the dawn of the internet, browsers have also allowed large advertising technology (adtech) players to sneak in third-party cookies to access information of unwitting users, track their footprints across the internet and profile them for targeted ads. Why did these cookies suddenly rattle Ghosh’s clients?

Google Chrome—which is used by 88% internet users in India and 64% globally, according to Similarweb—has declared that it is phasing out third-party cookies. On January 4, it blocked third-party cookies from tracking 1% of its user base; by the end of the year, it says, it will block third-party cookies from tracking all of its 3