Google Promises to Stop Tracking Users for Targeted Advertising
Last year, Google developers announced that the company planned to phase out the use of third-party tracking cookies within the next couple of years. At that time, many wondered whether Google would come up with another way to track individual users. Now, according to a recent post on the Google developers’ blog, the company states that it does not intend to use “any technology for tracking individual people” in the future.
“We continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we are making it clear that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not create alternative identifiers to track individuals as they browse the web, nor will we use them in our products,” Google said.
What Will Replace Cookies?
The plan for phasing out cookies is still not fully clear. Generally, it is known that Google intends to build a machine learning-based tracking system into Chrome that will group people by interests (such as “classical music lovers”) instead of creating individual profiles. Then, when it’s time to show ads, Chrome will rely on the user’s list of interests and display only relevant ads.
Previously, cookies allowed personal information and detailed browsing history to be sent to various ad servers, which then created a cloud-based interest profile. In the future, Chrome will store this detailed information locally and create the profile on the user’s device. Only a selection of interests will be shared with advertisers through an open API to display relevant ads.
Why This Change Benefits Google
While it might seem like Google is making a sacrifice, that’s not really the case. In fact, Google doesn’t need to track individuals for advertising purposes. In the future, cookies in Chrome will be replaced by the “Privacy Sandbox,” which uses group-based tracking and is actually better suited for advertisers.
“Advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the benefits of digital advertising. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing, and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers,” Google says.
For example, an advertiser promoting phones only cares about reaching people interested in phones. In this context, advertisers don’t need to know individual identities or exact browsing histories—just that users are open to that type of advertising.