Over the last few years, however, consumer opinions have shifted against this kind of targeting. In the wake of scandals like Cambridge Analytica (although it didn’t actually use cookies), society has broadly started to recognize both how invasive this kind of tracking is—and how it can be used to discriminate and reinforce prejudices. In a 2019 report from Pew Research Center, 79 percent of Americans were reportedly concerned about how much data companies were collecting about them, and 81 percent of Americans felt the potential risks of data collection outweighed the potential benefits. Apple was the first major consumer tech company to position itself as privacy-first. Its Safari browser has blocked some third-party cookies since 2017 and all third-party cookies since 2020. In 2021, it also introduced a feature where apps would have to ask for explicit permission from users to track them. (Facebook parent company Meta has claimed this last update alone will cost Facebook $10 billion in lost revenue this year). Firefox has also blocked some third-party cookies since 2019, and unveiled Total Cookie Protection in 2021 which consigns each site’s cookies to its own separate “cookie jar,” which bars information from being shared with other websites. There has also been a rise in privacy browsers, like those from DuckDuckGo and Brave, that take an even more aggressive stance on blocking tracking. Both use their own custom search engines as well as other privacy focused features like easy data deletion to limit how much data can be gleaned from your browsing activities. Even Google is getting in on the action. It will start blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome browser (the most popular browser in the world) in 2023—although that is about a year later than was initially planned. All this is still up in the air, though. Internet tracking is in a transitional phase. The European Union is levying increasingly large fines for breaches of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, which might start to skew the risk calculus for some companies. Efforts are also underway to block these new forms of tracking—both DuckDuckGo and Brave have just announced that their browsers will bypass Google’s AMP pages, one of the ways that Google has leveraged its size to further track users. Internet tracking is definitely going to continue but, fingers-crossed, it might get better.
