“Results showing returns on investment with Google Display Ads showed a 97 percent recovery, which Ad Age called strong, but effectiveness dropped in attempts to engage the same customers with follow-up ads, showing only a 55 percent recovery in spending for re-marketing audiences.”

There are no winners here, in any of this.

After all the posturing about Privacy, all that really happened is data-driven fuckery to get people to buy stuff they don’t need.

If I hadn’t already kicked Google the hell out of my personal life, this could have been another last straw, for me.

I’m grudgingly OK with this, at least if 3rd party cookies are reigned in somewhat with prompts / allow lists.

The main annoyance I noticed when Google started disabling them by default was that Spotify embeds could no longer detect that I was logged in. If someone shared a playlist or a track, I could only preview it via the embed rather than listen in full. There’s probably other services that were/are similarly affected.

Spotify is starting to visibly enshittify, so I don’t know how much longer that use-case will remain relevant, but for now, I’m glad I can expect that functionality to remain.