Is Google's Cookie-Cutting Good News for Privacy? 🤔

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Happy Thursday, folks.

Hope you are all enjoying your time with loved ones, whatever your work/vacay schedule might be this week. Even if you’re at work, I find it hard to believe that anyone gets anything done during that weird Dec 25-Jan 2 window, and wanting to see if there were any actual studies to prove this, I did a quick Google search and found that when looking at B2B web traffic, “every single day from December 18 through January 2 witnesses a double digit decrease in activity.”

So it’s not just you. We’re all mentally drinking eggnog, opening gifts, and watching bowl games, too.

No More Cookies in the Big Tech Cookie Jar

New Year’s Resolutions are good. You might want to read more, or do more exercise, or eat healthy.

Google's planning on cutting out the cookies, too, though their’s aren’t ambrosial, buttery clouds of chocolate chips and sugar that I am certainly not eating too many of from the comforts of my parents’ couch while writing this.

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “third-party cookies” (called third-party biscuits in the UK), but I’d venture to guess that few actually know what they are or how they affect you, and more than that, you probably don’t know how critical they are to the very core of the $679.8 billion digital ads market.

Why would they phase out such a valuable part of the internet economy, particularly as our lives seem to be lived more and more online?

Well, if it’s any indication, the group that celebrated this decision the hardest was the r/privacy sub.

Let's munch on what this means for the startup space.

Me to everyone who subscribes to Venture Scout:

Cheers to another day,

Trey