Google's vision of advertising and privacy

This morning the "Web economy and privacy protection" event organized by Google was staged to examine a complex dynamic such as the one that sees the interaction of the needs of those who base their business on the online world by supporting themselves through advertising and the need to protect the privacy of its users.

Advertising and privacy can coexist

A context that sees the Mountain View group as the absolute protagonist: in 2018 it distributed over 14 billion dollars to sites that take part in its advertising network. One of the tools examined in the meeting is that of cookies, used on a large scale to make the message conveyed more targeted and personal, favoring the monetization of the investment, but which must be used in a fully respectful of privacy as required by the regulations in force.

For its part, bigG has been looking ahead for some time now, projecting itself towards a new frontier, experimenting with new methods that are able to reconcile the needs of both parties involved. This is the case of the Privacy Sandbox for the Chrome browser announced in mid-2019 and about which we have also written on these pages. Also Nicola Roviaro, Head of EMEA Data Privacy Specialists at Google, at the head of a team that supports advertising investors working with the group, spoke about it in his speech.

This is why Chrome has introduced Privacy Sandbox, a collaboration initiative with the entire industry to achieve solid privacy standards and at the same time allow content creators to monetize them adequately. Through Privacy Sandbox, we want to understand, for example, how to better use data related to internet browsing with a view to stringent privacy for users, in areas such as the selection of an audience, the measurement of clicks and protection from fraud.

Privacy Sandbox is defined as an “open and collaborative initiative” involving standards and computer science experts as well as companies, trade associations and authorities. One of the advanced proposals is called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) and leverages the use of local machine learning algorithms, i.e. at the device level, in order to develop profiles subjected to rigid anonymization processes then collected in large groups of interest. Roviaro continues.

Helping companies to grow together with a privacy-friendly Web is not only a good business practice, it is also an engine for economic recovery. For this reason we continue to make sure that data brings the greatest possible benefit to society, through the sharing of open data for research, both private and public, and with tools and training offers to help people and companies to be in control. of their data.

Other initiatives recently unveiled by Google regarding the project also concern the measurement of advertising conversions, the limitation of tracking between different sites in the absence of secure markers and the reduction of the so-called fingerprinting for offer greater transparency and control.