| Let’s be honest, July is not the time of year for a lot of breaking news in the martech space. So thanks, Google, for waking everyone up last week by reversing course on Chrome third-party cookie deprecation. But as the dust settles, it’s fair to ask if anything has really changed. Don’t get me wrong — while many of us were asking whether cookie deprecation was worth all the misery from regulators and the ad ecosystem, this sudden announcement was certainly a surprise. What Google really accomplished, though, is cookie deprecation by a different route. Leave it to the users. If Chrome users opt out of cookies (as Google has said it will allow) and if they do it at the same rate as iPhone users opting out of tracking, cookies will essentially be dead anyway. And advertisers will have to take another look at Privacy Sandbox after all. Kim Davis
Editor at large | 