After more than a decade building it up huge profits of targeted ads, Google announced Wednesday that it plans to do away with any form of individual tracking and targeting once the cookie is no longer in the picture
In many ways, this announcement is just Google’s way of doubling down on its long-running pro privacy statements, starting with the first 2020 pledge to eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome by 2022. The privacy protectors among us can agree that it kills this species ubiquitous trackers and targeters is a net good, but it’s not the time to cheer for the privacy bona fide of a company built on our data – as some were tempted to do after Wednesday’s announcement.
As the date of cookies being killed draws closer, we’ve seen some big names in the data brokering and adtech biz – shady third parties taking advantage of cookies – are trying to sort of “universal identifierWhich could serve as a replacement if Google pulls the plug. In some cases, these new IDs depend on people’s email logins which are hashed and collectively retrieved from tons of sites on the internet. In other cases, companies plan to flesh out the pieces of an individual’s identifiable data with other data that can be retrieved from non-browser sources, such as their connected television or cell phones. There are tons of other schemes that these companies come up with during the cookie countdown, and apparently Google has none of them.
“We continue to receive questions about whether Google will join others in the ad technology industry looking to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers,” said David Temkin, head of Google’s product management team for “Ads Privacy and Trust” . wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.
In response, Temkin noted that Google does not believe that “these solutions will meet the rising expectations of consumers for privacy, nor will they withstand rapidly changing legal restrictions.” On that basis, these types of products are “not a sustainable long-term investment,” he added, noting that Google does not intend to build “alternative identifiers to track individuals” once the cookie is destroyed.
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What Google is doing plan on building however is its own set of “privacy preservation” tools for ad targeting, such as its Federated learning of cohorts, or FLoC for short. Just to notify people: While cookies (and some of these planned universal IDs) track people based on their individual browsing behavior as they bounce from site to site, under FLoC, a person’s browser would collect all the data sent by that browsing and basically put it in a big jar of data from people with similar browsing habits – a “herd”, if you will. Rather than being able to target ads to people based on the individual pieces of data a person generates, Google would allow advertisers to target these massive amounts of aggregated data.
We have written down our full thoughts on FLoC before– the short version is that, like the majority From the privacy push from Google we’ve seen so far, the FLoC proposal isn’t as user-friendly as you might think. Others have pointed out that this proposal does not necessarily have to be stop people aren’t tracked on the internet, it makes Google the only one doing it. This is one of the reasons the upcoming cookie chocolate has already under the microscope from competition authorities in the UK. Meanwhile, some US trading groups have already done so voiced loudly their suspicion that what Google is doing here is less about privacy and more about tightening up privacy obscenely tight grip about the digital advertising economy.
Which brings us back to that Google blog post from earlier this week – the one that was literally called “ charting a course for a more privacy-first web, ” while also forgetting about all the obvious issues that others have noticed with FLoC: how tracking is still followseven if it happens in total. How Google’s claim that FLoC targeting is ‘95% as effective ‘as cookie-based targeting appears to be based on bunk bed mathHow this trick would yield Google exclusive access to a lot of user data the company already has largely monopolizesIf Google is to actually shift the national discussion of consumer privacy, then it must start by clarifying what they think ‘privacy’ actually means.