After spending more than a decade building massive benefits outside of targeted advertising, Google announced Wednesday that you plan to remove any individualized tracking and guidance once the cookie is on out of the picture.
In many ways, this announcement is just Google’s way of doubling its long pro-privacy announcements, starting with the company initial promise of 2020 to remove third-party cookies in Chrome in 2022. Those who protect privacy among us may agree to kill this type of ubiquitous trackers and targets it’s a clean slate, but it’s not time to start encouraging good faith in the privacy of a company based on our data, as some were inclined to do after Wednesday’s announcement.
As the date of cookie deletion approaches, we’ve seen some important names in the data brokerage and advertising business (shady third parties taking advantage of cookies) try to reach a kind of “universal identifier”That could serve as a replacement once Google pulls the plug. In some cases, these new identifications depend on people email logins which are broken down and collectively collected from many sites on the web. In other cases, companies plan to specify fragments of a person’s identifiable data with other data that can be extracted from sources other than browsers, such as television or connected cell phones. There are tons of others schemes that these companies present in the middle of the cookie countdown, and apparently Google has none.
“We continue to receive questions about whether Google will join other advertising technology companies that plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers,” said David Temkin, who leads the team. Google Product Management for “Privacy and Ad Trust”. wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.
In response, Temkin noted that Google does not believe that “these solutions meet growing consumer privacy expectations, nor will they withstand rapidly evolving regulatory constraints.” Based on this, such products “are not a long-term sustainable investment,” he added, noting that Google has no plans to build “alternative identifiers to track people” once they are canceled. read the cookie.
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What Google does the construction plan, however, is its own set of “privacy preservation” tools for targeting ads, such as its Federated cohort learning, the FLoC shortly. Just to keep people up to date: while cookies (and some of these universal identifiers provided) track people by their individual browsing behavior as they bounce from one place to another, under FLoC, the a person’s browser would take all the data generated by that navigation and basically enter it into a large repository of data from people with similar browsing behavior: a “herd,” if you will. Instead of being able to target ads against people based on the individual pieces of data a person generates, Google would allow advertisers to target these giant batches of aggregated data.
We have written all our thoughts on FLoC before—The short version is like this, like the majority from the Google privacy we’ve seen so far, the FLoC proposal isn’t as easy to use as you might think. On the one hand, others have already pointed out that this proposal does not necessarily Stop if you track people across the web, it just guarantees that Google is the only one doing it. This is one of the reasons for the upcoming cookiepocolypse scrutiny already drawn of the UK competition authorities. Meanwhile, some American trade groups have already done so with a loud voice his suspicions that what Google is doing here is less about privacy and more about hardening it obscenely tight grip on the economics of digital advertising.
Which brings us back to Google’s blog post earlier this week: the post that was literally called “paving the way for a more private website,” while analyzing all the obvious issues that others have pointed out with FLoC: how is the tracking still tracking, even if it is happening in aggregate form. How Google’s claim that FLoC-based targeting is “95% more effective” than cookie-based targeting seems to be based math bunk beds. How would you give this ploy to Google exclusive access to a lot of user data that the company already has largely monopolized. If Google really wants to change the national conversation about consumer privacy, it should start by clarifying what they think really means “privacy.”