What Google’s decision to backtrack on eliminating cookies says about the company
As many of us had already feared, Google is once again rowing back from plans to eliminate third party cookies, one of the main ways it has long-breached user privacy.
Cookies date back to the early years of the internet, initially designed by Netscape as a simple way to save information between sessions. Since the internet protocol does not allow it, forcing all sessions to start without any context, Netscape came up with the possibility of sending, along with the requested page, a small file that would be stored in our computers that only we could retrieve, in order to check if the session corresponded to a user who had been on the page before.
So far, so good: the cookie did not contain any information about the user, only an identifier that provided a link to previous sessions — with some possible flaws, such as the fact that it does not identify the user but the computer.
Where things went wrong was when the advertising industry changed the rules so that cookies were no longer be sent by the owner of the page visited but by an ad server, allowing it to follow our activity on the web. Third-party cookies are responsible, for example, for those persistent ads that offer you hotels in Rome just because you searched for information about a ticket to Rome…
