Google will stop selling ads based on your specific web browser

The decision, which comes from the world’s largest digital advertising company, could help the industry move away from using such individualized tracking, which is increasingly criticized by privacy advocates and scrutinized by regulators.

Google’s weight means that its move is also likely to set back some competitors in the digital ad industry, where many companies rely on tracking individuals to target their ads, measure their effectiveness, and stop fraud. According to Jounce Media, a digital advertising consultancy, Google accounted for 52% of global digital ad spend of $ 292 billion last year.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to meet the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is used, we risk the future of the free and open internet,” said David Temkin, Google’s product manager who manages the change. said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Google had already announced last year that it would remove the most commonly used tracking technology, called third-party cookies, by 2022. But now the company says it will not build alternative tracking technologies or use the technologies being developed by other entities. , to replace third-party cookies with its own ad-buying tools.

Instead, Google says its ad-buying tools will use new technologies it has co-developed in what it calls a “privacy sandbox” to target ads without gathering information about individuals from multiple websites. One of these technologies analyzes the browsing habits of users on their own devices and allows advertisers to target aggregated groups of users with similar interests, or “cohorts”, rather than individual users. Google said in January that it plans to begin testing purchases with that technology in the second quarter.

Google’s elimination of multi-site individualized tracking could reshape the industry, given the market power of its ad-buying tools. According to Jounce, about 40% of the money that flows from advertisers to publishers on the open Internet – that is, the portion of digital advertising outside closed systems like Google Search, YouTube or Facebook – goes through Google’s ad-buying tools.

Google says Wednesday’s announcement does not cover its advertising tools and unique identifiers for mobile apps, only for websites. But the plan is the latest sign that the tide could turn broader user tracking.

Apple Inc. pursues its own plans to limit app usage tracking by requiring developers to obtain user consent before collecting an advertising ID for iPhones. At the same time, the European Union’s privacy regulators have filed multiple complaints about the information websites share with third parties about what content users view as part of such tracking.

One of the complaints comes from Brave Software Inc., maker of a privacy-focused web browser, where Google’s Mr. Temkin was Chief Product Officer until last summer. Google says Mr. Temkin’s involvement in his plan demonstrates his commitment to user privacy. Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The changes at Google come as large tech companies face multiple antitrust investigations. Smaller digital ad companies using cross-site tracking have accused Apple and Google of using privacy as a pretext for changes that hurt competitors. And the CEO of Facebook Inc. Mark Zuckerberg said in a January earnings call that “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with the way our apps and other apps work.”

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority, the country’s largest antitrust regulator, opened a formal investigation last month into Google’s phasing out of third-party cookies from the Chrome browser. The probe stemmed from a complaint from a group of marketers who claimed that Google’s plan would bolster the company’s weight in the online advertising space.

A Google spokesperson said the company has informed the UK’s CMA of its plan to end its own use of unique tracking across multiple websites.

Google’s announcement hampers the advertising industry’s efforts to come up with alternative, more privacy-friendly technology to target individual consumers, such as the technology led by the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, a group of advertisers and ad technology companies , which would rely on new identifiers, such as strings of numbers and letters derived from users’ email addresses. Without directly mentioning the partnership’s efforts, Mr. Temkin referred to IDs “based on people’s email addresses” as examples of tools Google will not use.

Google acknowledged that other companies may continue to use other ways to track users. Companies that use parts of Google’s ad infrastructure, such as the ad exchange, may still be able to sell ads that use their own unique identifiers, Google said. But the company said it will not use or invest in such tools for ads it sells.

“We realize this means that other providers can provide a user identity level for ad tracking across the web that we will not provide,” Mr. Temkin wrote in the blog post. “We do not believe these solutions will meet the rising expectations of consumers for privacy, nor will they withstand rapidly evolving legal restrictions.”

There are exceptions to Google’s plan. The company’s limit for unique tracking IDs does not extend to so-called first-party data – information that a company gets directly from a customer. For example, websites can sell ads based on users’ activity only on that specific site.

It also means that Google will continue to allow advertisers to target ads on Google services such as YouTube to specific customers for whom they already have contact information. But when the changes take effect, Google will stop targeting such ads to those people when they browse other websites.

Nestlé SA, a major advertiser that informed Google of the changes, said it welcomed the initiative for privacy reasons.

“We have long recognized and advocated the importance of first party data, and it will become even more important in a world of privacy,” said Aude Gandon, Nestle’s global chief marketing officer.

Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected] and Keach Hagey at [email protected]