Dumb business law bullshit that shouldn’t matter but does.
Dropping third-party cookies entirely would be a security and privacy boon for users, and the Chrome folks have wanted to do it for a while. But they can’t drop third-party cookies without giving some kind of replacement to the “adtech industry” people. (Not their own ad people — rather, Facebook and the folks who put up the nasty teeth ads.)
Why? Because antitrust law. If Google undermines “adtech” — even though literally no users want “adtech” — then the “adtech” people (possibly including Facebook) will sue them and win. Because in American law, a big business isn’t supposed to directly undermine another big business like that.
Sensible folks should just turn off the ad-targeting setting and third-party cookies.
To be clear, yes, I’m saying that this move by Google is not evil. It doesn’t take away any privacy that users weren’t already losing to third-party cookies from Facebook and other “adtech industry” folks. Rather, it makes it possible to limit how much of your privacy the “adtech” folks get to mess with.
And you and I can already turn it off, and turn third-party cookies off.
And yes, I do think “adtech” is basically a bunch of spammers who (in the words of Douglas Adams) will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes; and that Google is at least slightly better than that.
And yes, antitrust law is, in general, a good thing. This is a weird corner case that, if it had been better anticipated, could have been avoided. It sure would be nice if Chrome were completely separate from the Google business that makes money from ads. Chrome is actually pretty damn good at a lot of things; including (back in the day) getting lots of Windows users to ditch Internet Explorer when it was actively being used by criminals to take over their computers and do crime.