Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow?

For privacy activists, 2021 brings one big victory after another. First, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced in March that it would stop tracking individual users as they roam from site to site. This decision was part of Alphabet's broader campaign to phase out the use of third-party cookies – an old but controversial technology, increasingly blamed for today's lax culture of data-sharing.