The Lionesses brought football home! And also some stuff about social media and Google.

Google delays plans to phase out third party cookies

Google has delayed plans to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome following public backlash over its replacement. The ban, which was initially scheduled for 2022, will now take place towards the end of 2023. In a statement on the delay, it explained that it has become clear that more time was needed across the ecosystem to ‘get this right’. 

“While there’s considerable progress with this initiative, the aim of the Privacy Sandbox is to create web technologies that both protect people’s privacy online and give companies and developers the tools to build thriving digital businesses. In order to do this, we need to move at a responsible pace,” it wrote.

That makes it sound like it was entirely their choice. It wasn’t. Google has had an uphill battle since announcing that it would be replacing third-party cookies with its own proprietary tech, with critics arguing that it’ll force advertisers to go directly to the company, giving it an unfair advantage in the marketplace. It’s proposals are even under investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)

Tough cookies, Google.

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Instagram walks back on updates to the platform

Five. Four. Three. Two. And *snap* It’s two weeks ago. Instagram is still Instagram and not TikTok and everything is exactly the way it always was.

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Instagram is walking back recent changes to the platform, following intense criticism from users and the Kardashians. (They’re a class of their own, right?) Over the next two weeks, it will phase out the test version of the app that turned the home feed into a full-screen, integrated experience *cough TIKTOK cough* and will also reduce the number of recommended posts in the app as it works to improve its algorithms.

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“I’m glad we took a risk - if we’re not failing every once in a while, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough. But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. When we’ve learned a lot, then we come back with some sort of new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that,” said chief Adam Mosseri.

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The past few weeks has seen growing user frustration over a series of changes that has turned Instagram into a TikTok 2.0. The more it has tried to compete with its social adversary by pushing users towards video, the more it has pushed them away. But it was Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashain who delivered the final blow with a meme demanding the platform to ‘Make Instagram Instagram again’.

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Worked a charm.

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The new Gen Z Throwback trend is worrying

It’s not often that a TikTok trend gives you an existential quandary over the future of human memory, but there’s a first time for everything.

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In the platform’s latest trend, Gen Z users are digging through their digital archives to post throwbacks of anywhere between 2 months to 2 years. So, the other day basically.

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But the accuracy with which users are recalling their past selves, coupled with the proximity of the memory to the present, is causing concern that technology may be killing our ability to reminisce.

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Nostalgia depends, to a large extent, on the ability to misremember; to be able to rewrite events in our head. But there’s no way of doing that when everything is recorded online - including the things you want to (and should) be able to forget.

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“Gradually and without all that much fanfare, a whole generation of digital native have come to adulthood in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it. Nothing is forgotten. You can’t romanticise or reinvent or re-narrate your own history. The most you can do in terms of taking possession of it is to remix the raw material,” says one spectator (the literary editor of the Spectator to be precise).

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The psychological and social fact of total recall is slowly transforming the human experience and soon we’ll forget how easy it is to forget.

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