Apple Safari started to roll out features to block third-party cookies and 2017 and made it the default in 2020. Firefox started to block all third-party cookies by default in 2019. Google said they'd block third-party cookies by default by early 2022, then late 2023, then sometime in 2024, but as of 2025, it's still not the default. Google had also announced the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019, which promised to find a balance between respecting user privacy and still allowing the ad-supported internet to continue.
"Don't be evil" used to be Google's motto for most of its life as a corporation. It used to be the first sentence of their Code of Conduct, but supposedly it only exists as part of the last sentence these days. And many know that I've been on the Google Kool-Aid for years as well - it's one of the reasons this blog is still hosted by Blogger on the backend of a custom domain.This week, Google announced that their Privacy Sandbox effort is effectively dead. This is after they said they were abandoning blocking third-party cookies in Chrome last year. So...what next? It sounds like Google is more concerned with maintaining its ad business and how well it's services integrate with Chrome versus trying to address legitimate privacy concerns. I'm a digital marketer and my bread and butter is working with different ad platforms to tailor ad targeting to reach users and the right time and even I recognize that some forms of tracking go too far. Plus with the other major browsers already haven taken steps to move away from third-party cookies, how is maintaining the status quo the "right thing" for Google to do?
It's terribly, terribly disappointing.
So I'm testing out the Brave browser at the moment as a Chrome alternative (although technically, I've set it as my default browser during my test period). It takes a very severe approach to cookie-blocking and I figure I'm bound to run into issues here and there (like it wouldn't let me upload my blog header photo initially), so I need to assess if this will work out. This includes using it for office stuff, and Chromium support for extensions that I need for work will go a long way towards keeping productive as normal. This may seem like a small change, but I guess it's more the principle of the thing.
I recognize that I'm very heavily invested in the Google ecosystem - and a lot of that was by choice. My trust in the organization meant that I was generally good with trading information in exchange for better services and whatever. But I don't know if that's truly the case anymore. Google Search is still my default search engine, but I'm reducing my saved search history to the minimum 3 months, but I might disable it entirely. Maybe I should try using Brave's search engine as a privacy-focused alternative, although they still have AI summaries, so that's a littler weird. I've scaled back both my location history and YouTube history to a more comfortable 18 months, but maybe dropping to 3 months in that area will make sense as well.
If Brave works out well enough, I'll fully uninstall Chrome on all my devices and pivot entirely. It largely feels like Chrome, which is making the transition a lot easier. I'm not sure if it's running any faster than Chrome was, but I am trying to keep notes or whatever. I'm ignoring Brave's weird crypto-adjacent revenue model during this test/transition because I'm not ready for that sort of thing. And I'm going to take a serious look at all my Google services and activities and see if there liberties I've allowed Google that I now want to pull back. One step at a time.
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