Four and a half years ago, Google laid out an extraordinary plan to stop supporting third-party cookies—widely used by advertisers since the web's early days to track what people do online—in its market-leading Chrome browser. The company said it would replace those cookies with its own “Privacy Sandbox” technology that would let advertisers target users with the most appropriate ads.
It pitched the idea as a way to “increase the privacy of web browsing,” but the plan kept hitting roadblocks—and yesterday Google all but abandoned it. What happened is pretty complicated—and it’s this complexity, reflecting the conflicting imperatives of the various players in the web ecosystem, that was Google’s undoing.
