Google promises to drop custom ad tracking. The tech giant is one of the biggest advertising companies in the world and also owns Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser.
However, it follows other browser providers through the removal of third-party cookies.
The UK competition authority is already examining this move.
In January, the Competition and Markets Authority said that Google’s intention to delete cookies – to effectively shared with advertisers less information – could “dramatically affect” the advertising market and news websites.
One group of marketers opposed the idea that the removal of such cookies would benefit Google because of other ways in which it could obtain personal information from users.
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What’s a cookie about?
Cookies store little data about what a user does on the website temporarily and constitute a significant part of the modern internet.
For instance, you can “remember” things like what is in a shopping basket online or whether you’ve logged in.
However, a third-party tracking cookie can be used to “follow” a user from site to site so that a website can “know” that you were buying something – such as clothes and shoes – for some products and advertise them elsewhere.
These are the types that have been gradually eliminated by Google, which are already blocked by default with some important competitor web browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s safari.
What’s Google talking about?
Some criticisms expressed concerns about Google’s plans to stop such cookies preventing its competitors from constructing useful ad target information catalogs, but that Google itself may still be able to do so.
In its new announcement, the company appeared to address the idea directly.
“We explicitly state today that when we phase out third-party cookies, we will not produce [alternative] identifiers to track individuals when they browse the web and will not use them in our products,” said the company in the blog post.
• ‘Endemic spy pixels in emails’
• UK plans for each tech giant to tailor a set of rules
The knock-on effect was that other providers could eventually offer “a level of user identification for web-based ad tracking that we won’t do” (although Firefox and Safari already block the offending cookies by default).
“We do not think these solutions will meet the rising consumer privacy expectations or resist the rapidly evolving regulatory constraints and thus are not long-term sustainable investment,” said Google.
But the industry group Marketers for an Open Web, who argue Google would have unfair benefits, have challenged this portrait.
Google has not promised to stop personal marketing or data collection inside its products — that means changing its terms and conditions of its products — director James Rosewill said.
Regulators have yet to ensure competition, he said, or “advertisers have little choice in terms of where they are spending their money.”
He argued that the average user has fewer privacy advantages.
“You have a large trillion-dollar company which effectively tracks you more times by an unfair contract. The only difference here is that you will be logged in and part of their walled garden.”
“How can that make more private or secure people versus something not directly identifiable – its name, email address – using only an altered character string?”
Instead, what could happen?
Years of increased regulation and consumer awareness have driven the removal of cookies.
However, stopping the use of cookies does not prevent all personalized tracking, because the company has developed creative solutions for creating personalized data.
So-called fingerprints, for instance, attempt to use a wide variety of device details – your phone or computer type, your browser version, your language, your IP address, or what fonts you have installed – in order to identify the machine.
The advertiser may not be aware of the name of the person, but it still can ‘follow’ this unique web fingerprint.
Google, which will continue to sell announcements, argues that it and others must find a solution that “provides results” for advertisers.
It now says that people should not be invasively tracked so as to “take advantage” of focused advertising.
Google said in its blog post that one way is to “hide persons within large multitudes with common interests” so that it would be difficult for an individual to figure out his browsing history.
Source: BBC
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