Google: after cookies, the logic of privacy wins

Google

What will come next to third party cookies? The road has now begun on an inclined plane with no possibility of return, but the standard that will emerge once this horizon is exceeded is still unclear. However, Google seems to have set its own objectives and, given the size of the group, given its impact on the advertising market and given the announced level of ambition, in all likelihood in these words a real standard is set to which everyone will have to refer.

Google: after cookies you change your way

This is explained by Google with a post by David Temkin, Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust:

Keeping an internet open and accessible to all requires an extra effort from all of us to protect privacy and that means ending not only third party cookies, but also any technology used to track individuals as they browse the web . We continue to strive to preserve a vibrant and open ecosystem where people can access a wide range of ad-supported content with the confidence that their privacy and choices are respected. And we will continue to work in this direction together with other operators in the sector.

“Our latest tests on FLoC technology,” explains Temkin, “show a way to effectively eliminate third-party cookies from advertising techniques, anonymizing individuals within large groups of people with interests similar (cohorts). Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing in the next release this month, while we plan to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with Google Ads advertisers in the next quarter. "

Google therefore believes to have identified its own way, but all this without going to constitute new simulacra of the old cookies. In this the group is clear: Google really wants to raise the bar and considers it desirable for the authorities to take a parallel path that cuts off the market for convenient solutions that, while returning more reliable data, do not offer equal respect for privacy. of users.

We understand that this means that other providers may provide a level of detail on the identity of users, for tracking online ads, which we will not bea> able to offer, such as PII charts based on people's email addresses. We do not believe that these solutions will meet the growing expectations that people have in terms of privacy, nor will they be able to resist rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions; for this reason we believe they are not a sustainable long-term investment. Our web products, on the other hand, will work thanks to APIs that preserve privacy and prevent individual tracking, while continuing to provide effective results for advertisers and publishers.

Tracking will therefore end, or at least this is it the vision that Google offers to the market. A straight-legged intervention that the competition will inevitably have to deal with.

Source: Google

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Google will stop letting advertisers track users across the open internet

© PHILIPPE HUGUEN/GETTY IMAGES FRANCE-INTERNET-GOOGLE

Google says it won't develop new ways to follow individual users across the internet after it phases out existing ad-tracking technology from Chrome browsers.

As part of an overhaul it says will tighten up consumers' privacy, the search giant has been working on proposals to remove from Chrome so-called third party cookies. Those are snippets of code used by a website's advertisers to record browsing history in order to show users their personalized ads.

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Third-party cookies have been a longstanding source of privacy concerns, so Google proposes instead grouping together web users with similar interests and keeping web histories private on user devices.

In a blog post, David Temkin, Google's director of product management for ads privacy and trust, said the company continues to get questions on whether it will join others in the ad-tech industry that plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers.

'Today, we're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,'  Temkin said.

Instead, Google is testing grouping users into buckets of common interests and selling ads to these larger groups, instead of tracking people individually. The search giant plans to make the tools available in the second quarter, Temkin said.

Businesses will still be able to track users' so-called first-party data, or information that the companies collect on consumers. Google's plans also do not include tracking on mobile apps, the Wall Street Journal reported. Google will still be able to track users itself through data collected from its services like Search, Maps and YouTube.

Google plans to roll out the changes by next year. However, the proposals have drawn criticism from players in the online ad industry as well as scrutiny from U.K. regulators over concerns that it will add to the tech giant's already dominant power in online advertising.

Chrome is the world's dominant web browser, and many rival browsers like Microsoft's Edge are based on Google's Chromium technology. 

CBS News' Irina Ivanova contributed reporting.