Chrome Bails On Google’s Privacy Sandbox And OpenAI Wants To Buy It And Make It “AI-first”

It’s All Bad News

If Chrome is your browser of choice then Alphabet would like to offer you several new reasons to reconsider that preference.  The first is their planned implementation of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which would let websites still deliver ads while protecting your privacy.  The privacy sandbox would give you a way to easily disable third-party cookies; the sites you visit would still be able to drop cookies on your computer but external sites would not.  That implementation would ensure the sites you visit would still work properly but would prevent other ad agencies from tracking your actions on other websites via those third party cookies.

The privacy sandbox was the final solution from Google after six years of failed initiatives, blocked by privacy advocates and ad companies both.  It was not even that intrusive for those that might see their tracking cookies blocked, it was an opt-in screen offered to users to block third party cookies by default.  Google claims that they’ve abandoned the privacy sandbox because they “been heartened to see the advertising industry taking privacy more seriously.”  In truth it is more likely that Google wanted to avoid yet another anti-trust suite.  If they offered a branded way to block third party cookies, some government would be likely to see that as yet another attempt by Google to grab market share.  This is not completely without merit, as ad companies would have to adapt to the feature globally, and other browsers wouldn’t be able to benefit in the same way Chrome would.  There are still non-proprietary ways to block third party cookies, and work on improving the protection Incognito mode offers, so at least it isn’t a complete loss for user privacy.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Ars Technica revealed that OpenAI might be interested in buying Chrome from Google if they are forced to divest it because of the current anti-trust suite levied against them.  If the legal decision from the US DOJ goes against Google they could indeed be forced to sell Chrome and OpenAI sees an opportunity to shove even more LLM results down our throats.  It seems that incorporating ChatGPT into Bing’s searches wasn’t a great idea, considering Microsoft has to offer the opportunity to win money to try to get people to use their browser.  If OpenAI was able to grab Chrome, they would reach a much larger audience and it would be much easier to make Chrome an “AI-first” experience as opposed to OpenAI trying to design their own Chromium browser.

It really might be time to reconsider your browser choices.