For years, privacy was treated as advertising’s great reckoning. The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, Apple’s crackdown on mobile identifiers and the slow death march of third-party cookies in the largest browser — it all painted a picture of a future where platforms would be reined in, marketers would be forced to adapt and users would finally gain some measure of control over their data.
That future never quite arrived.
What followed instead was a slower, stranger drift: enforcement grew spotty. Regulatory efforts stalled and the largest platforms — Google, Meta, Amazon — emerged with even more concentrated power than before. Fines dried up. Reforms got diluted or delayed. And cookie deprecation, once symbolic of the new era, came full circle when Google confirmed it wouldn’t eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome after all.
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