Wiser! #5 — We like pizza!

The food issue, featuring Google cookies, robot home shopping deliveries, tech that reads your thoughts and $300m pizzas!

What’s the fuss about Google, cookies and the so-called demise of surveillance capitalism?

As part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative last year, Google announced the demise of the 3rd party cookie from the Chrome browser. This is the mechanism that Google uses to follow and track your every move on the Internet.

It uses the data it collects to build a unique profile of you. Advertisers pay (through an auction system) to place their ads in front of you based on this profile. This is why you “coincidentally” start seeing ads appear in your browser for things related to what you were watching on YouTube.

Today, Google (with Facebook) totally boss (86%) online advertising revenues because of this ability to target personalised ads. Added to this is Chrome’s dominance with over 60% of the browser market. So, when Google posted this blogpost earlier this month, they received plenty of back slapping for getting on the privacy bandwagon.

However, upon inspection, all is not quite as it seems with the Google proposals.

Because, whilst it is the case that Google will no longer track a user based on…