Third-party cookies have increasingly been left out as the public better protects privacy rights in an age of algorithms and data. Some major browsers, including Firefox and Safari, now block third-party cookies by default, further reducing their usability for advertisers. And Google has already said it plans to do the same in its browser, Chrome.
The future of tracking-based web advertising, Google argued, will be more abstract, relying less on a person’s browsing history and more on what groups of web users can view at any given time.
Given Google’s tremendous role in the advertising world and its control of the world’s most popular web browser, the company has the potential to determine how the next generation of ad technology works. But Google’s vision isn’t alone. Recognizing that change is coming soon, privacy advocates and others in the industry have put forward different ideas about how the future should unfold. At the same time, policymakers are drafting new regulations and questioning Google’s dominance in ways that could have a significant impact on the company’s ability to execute its plan.
A more anonymous way of tracking?
To understand what Google is pitching, it helps to think about Facebook.
Facebook also makes its money by showing ads. It does not sell user information directly to advertisers; instead, it allows advertisers to target ads to certain categories of Facebook users based on that data. By cutting people’s identities to pieces based on their relationship status, the pages they liked, and even the content they clicked on, Facebook can sell access to very specific groups.
According to policy experts, the system being developed by Google and others in standards-setting forums is based on the same principle. Brands could advertise “cohorts” of internet users who share similar traits, as defined by an algorithm. But unlike today, the marketers would not have access to specific data about individual members of the cohort.
The approach advocated by Google would theoretically give users more power than Facebook’s model. Rather than centralizing all user data under one roof, internet users’ web history remains stored in their own browser or on their own devices. Depending on which version of this idea is implemented – there are many – users can have settings that allow them to control what information their browser shares with the world. Ads for shoes and camping gear could still track you around the Internet this way, but advertisers would now be sending those ads to you and thousands of others as a group, not as an individual.
That concept, which Google is currently testing, is designed to replace third-party tracking cookies, which can track you from site to site and develop a very detailed picture of your browsing history for advertising purposes.
“It fundamentally scares people,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, an industry association representing news publishers. So if you’re a tech giant like Google, whose business relies on user tracking, Chavern said, “you want to get ahead of these curves.”
Privacy advocates are wary
Google says its vision of the future helps improve user privacy while still giving advertisers the same opportunity to target audiences.
“Advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers on the Internet to get the performance benefits of digital ads,” the company stated in its blog post. “Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-protecting technologies provide a clear path to replace individual identifiers.”
Some privacy experts agree that the Google-backed proposal would be an improvement on the status quo – at least in theory.
“For me it’s a good step and a good signal, but I’d like to see the latest package of solutions,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher and former lead technologist with the Federal Trade Commission.
One of the most important factors to keep in mind, Soltani said, is how the user’s controls are designed. Do they provide a one-click mechanism that allows users to opt out of data sharing? Can users choose what types of data to share with advertisers? Are the controls easy for an average person to find and use?
Others are more skeptical, arguing that the proposal will only trade one form of invasive monitoring for another.
“We need to envision a better world without the myriad problems of targeted advertising,” Cyphers wrote.
What the ad industry wants
Some in the ad industry are working on an alternative to Google’s approach.
“Google’s announcement has not changed our plans to provide a new set of approaches to addressability, privacy and accountability,” said Bill Tucker, PRAM’s executive director, in a statement in response to Google’s blog post.
Without mentioning PRAM, Google has called the email-based approach impractical.
“We do not believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy,” he said in his blog post, “nor will they withstand rapidly evolving regulatory constraints, and therefore are not a sustainable long-term investment.”
Privacy and policy experts have also criticized the email-based approach. As with other forms of supposedly “anonymized” data, they said, it is trivial to reverse engineer an individual’s identity by combining encrypted information with other publicly available data.
They added that using encrypted email addresses is in some ways worse from a privacy perspective than using cookies, which can at least be easily erased from a browser.
“I have the same personal email address from the late 1990s,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade group representing digital publishers. “It’s nearly impossible to sanitize. So it’s a misconception that some hashed email will be more private than a cookie.”
Google’s new solution could make it more powerful
Even though it differs from the third-party cookie, that doesn’t mean Google has become the consumer knight in shining armor. As the company faces multiple antitrust lawsuits by state and federal officials for its dominance of search and advertising, the Google-backed tracking proposal is being scrutinized as to how it could further anchor the company.
“Google is the largest tracker of any business on the Internet,” said Kint. “They compete in the same market where they design the rules.”
Google’s control of key technology products and its ability to process data at scale gives it huge benefits – and an incentive to exploit them, Soltani agrees. If Google wants to keep some sort of home court advantage, that could amplify the outrage from Google’s antitrust critics, he added.
Still, he said, “what the defaults are, what the controls are, I think will ultimately determine how genuine Google’s push is.”
Google told CNN Business that the ad giant would not have special access to browsing data under its proposal. Google will only be able to see the same aggregated information as the rest of the market, the company said. But the company didn’t rule out matching browsing cohorts with the vast amounts of data Google collects about the individual users of its many products and services.